Cause and Effect, Dog Eat Dog

They say that a sure sign of insanity is continuing to do the same thing while expecting a different result. If this is true, then the country, or at least its government, is pretty nuts.
Looking at the recent tragedy in Boston, the lives destroyed or wasted, it's clear that the Salafi/Wahabbi strain of Islam is a clear existential threat. Tamlan Tsaraev wasn't a real threat to anyone until he came into contact with and under the sway of this intolerant, vitriolic, and hatefully violent strain of Islam. Salafists don't even like their fellow Muslims very much, destroying as they do Sufi shrines (Rumi, for instance, was a Sufi), attacking Shiites, and even other Sunnis that they just don't like, or that they deem "not religious enough."
Yet, this country, as well as others in the West, continue to support and send petrodollars to the giant of the Wahabbi world, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia sends Wahabbi missionaries throughout the Islamic world, and the result is always trouble. Salafist/Wahabbist radicals have stirred trouble in Morocco, Indonesia, Tunisia, metastasizing and doing their level best to warp Islam in such places. Look at Timbuktu; a center of Islamic learning for centuries, what happened when Salafists gained control of it from the Malian government? They started systematically destroying shrines that were centuries old, attacking imams that were Sufi/non-Salafi, and generally made life difficult for the people there. Bear in mind, the people of Mali are Muslim. Even so, they weren't spared the violence of Salafist/Wahabbists.
The men who flew the planes into the WTC were Saudi. Saudi Wahabbist missionaries spread their liturgy of hatred and violence in the Islamic world, quietly and not-so-quietly, yet we and Israel are fixated on Iran as the enemy. Iran engulfs our attention, because of their designs of hegemony in the region, because they want to be taken seriously. Well, duh, everyone wants to be taken seriously, and exercise some form of influence. Why should the Iranians be any different? We do it all the time.
Someday, Israel and the West are going to have to wake up to the fact that Iran is not the real threat. Yes, Ahmadinejad is loud, but that just means he's goofy. Saudi Arabia's Wahabbist missionaries, meanwhile, continue to spread their vile message, funded by our petro dollars.
The Buddha warned that all actions create kamma, that the law of cause and effect is one that we all follow simply by virtue of acting. We have to start acting more intelligently, with wisdom, so as not to sow seeds that will bear bitter fruit later.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Recently, I've been reading a lot of posts by friends whom I always thought of as, "having it together." I've always admired their ability to get things done, to organize, to be positive. They've always made me feel, I have to admit, slightly ashamed of my perceived lack of ability. My inattentiveness to my own life.
The posts I've been reading, however, show that sometimes even the most positive of people go through their own personal trials. Feelings of discontent, malaise, and outright dissatisfaction with life. For all their "togetherness," they don't seem to be any happier than I am.
This goes toward something talked about in Buddhism; the levels of suffering. The most gross is, "the suffering of suffering." Suffering with an illness, a major problem, a sick relative, being assaulted. Then there is the suffering of change, wherein a person, any person, feels overwhelmed by the changes in life. Nothing is permanent, and people like permanence, or at least want pleasurable things to last. Finally, there is all-pervasive suffering, a sub-conscious dissatisfaction with life, and existence, itself. Because we all want to be free of suffering, and the ego clings to the phenomenal world. But since everything is impermanent, the world is incapable of satisfying permanently. So, we make demands on the world, changing it ourselves as we do so, and speeding our journey into dissatisfaction.
Pema Chodron writes of an image of the Buddha, where he's seated under the bodhi tree just before his enlightenment. The forces of Mara, the illusory world, are attacking him, trying to stop his ultimate Awakening. The demon army of Mara fires many weapons at Siddartha, arrows, spears, and swords. Yet just before reaching the meditating Siddartha, the sharp points of the weapons transform into lotus flowers. Chodron writes that one meaning of this image is that the very things that one experiences as a sharp sword could also be experienced as a flower; the very thing meant to cut you down can wake you up, if you pay close attention.
Easier said than done. My normal reaction to such problems has been to shut down, and let someone else take over. Ultimately, however, no one can take over your life for you. You have to live it to the best of your ability.
Life is short. Make the most of it while you can. What is this suffering, this dukkha, pointing to? Knowing that, you can perhaps start to make life your friend, and not feel so oppressed.

Gratitude

Hi folks. I know, I know, I've been a very bad blogger, leaving lots of time between posts. I'm going to have to amend my peripatetic ways. 

In fact, I'm grateful to have the opportunity to fix my said peripatetic ways. Which is the purpose of this little post, I suppose. To express my gratitude.

My mom, as many of my friends know, had a stroke in 2010. Not entirely debilitating, it nevertheless deprived her of her prized independence, forcing her to rely on help and considering moving from her home in Puerto Rico into an assisted living residence.

Last week, she interviewed at such a residence. In two days, we got the response; not eligible at this time. My dad took that news kind of hard, but my mom took it with grace and aplomb. She told me, "Things happen for a reason. We always have to be grateful, even when bad things happen, because we don't know what it ultimately leads to." 

How often are we actually grateful? How often do we actually just go about our activities, all the while complaining to ourselves, in our minds, about life's injustices? Able-bodied, well-off, and complaining. This can describe a lot of people, I think. My best friend, who works on Wall Street, talks about co-workers who pull in huge salaries complaining that it's never enough. That they've been rooked. That they deserve more. 

Perception is a funny thing. Here are people with everything, acting poor. My mom, not wealthy, not hale, acting as if she's rich. Well, at least acting content. I find a lot of inspiration in that. 

Cicero said that gratitude isn't only the greatest of all virtues, but is the parent of all others. I think that's very profound. Do you? 

Happy New Year!

Gong xi fa tsai!
This February 10th, today, marks the day of the largest mass migration of people in the entire calendar year; it's the Lunar New Year. Celebrated in Asia for thousands of years, we now leave the Year of the Dragon, and enter into the Year of the Snake.
According to Chinese astrology, children born this year will be smart, yet possessive. Easy to love, but jealous. Charismatic and intelligent, the snake is good at, well, snaking things out of people and catching vibes. Snakes are thinkers, motivated, creative, but also prone to revenge.
It's a lot of fun to posit all this stuff about Snakes and all, but of course it doesn't really pigeon-hole people anymore than Western astrology does. Still, it's all in good fun, and makes a great excuse to go out and eat pork-soup dumplings and gui zhou beef.
So, enjoy this year of the Water Snake, and get your slither on!
新年快樂

A Strange Achilles Heel

Buddhism and Christianity share the same Achilles heel. That's a strange statement to make about two religions that share almost nothing in common, but it's true. The shame of it is that this (for lack of a better word) flaw results in a misunderstanding that confounds followers in both traditions.
The two faiths have doctrines that at first glance seem very dissimilar. In Buddhism, there is the idea or concept of emptiness; things are said to be empty, and you can extend this idea to all things in the universe. I am empty, time is empty, this earth is empty, even the dharma and karma are empty. Christianity has the doctrine of grace. That is, that people are not under the law of Judaism any longer, but are justified by the sake of grace.
The two doctrines have had great people within their respective traditions that formulated them and brought them to the fore in the thinking of the people who came after them. In Buddhism, it was Nagarjuna who fully elucidated the idea of emptiness, while in Christianity, it was Paul who expounded the idea of grace.
The two men probably could not have been farther apart in their thinking, but in the end they laid the same trap for people who came after them. Namely, the idea that one could act in all sorts of abominable ways and that it was alright.
In the Christian tradition, all sorts of tortures, killing, and horrific acts have been perpetrated in order to spread the faith. This is well known. Less well known in the West is the behavior of people ostensibly Buddhist, but who also have acted in less than exemplary ways. Japan has a strongly Buddhist background, for instance, yet they fell prey to militaristic behavior that has been documented as among the worst of the 20th century. More recently, the regime in Myanmar has also given pause to people who believe that Buddhists are all peaceable and cuddly.
How could this happen? The two religious traditions abhor wrong behavior, and admonish their adherents to behave in as moral a light as possible. How could a tradition such as Christianity produce the behavior of the Inquisition? How could Zen monks march to war with rifles slung over their shoulders? Grace and emptiness, or more precisely, the misunderstanding and misapplication of the two doctrines, are to blame.
To think that one is justified by grace and faith alone results in a curious phenomenon; that is, people think that so long as they "have Christ in their hearts" and say sorry at the end of their lives, they can get into heaven. That leaves the door open to acting in all sorts of atrocious ways. Repeatedly stealing, lying, abusing substances, womanizing. After all, how many TV evangelists in recent years have been shown to be serial adulterers? The Book of James makes very clear that faith without works, in other words, practice, is a dead ideal. Yet, many who followed Luther and Pauline doctrine have proclaimed that faith alone is enough to justify you. James, however, understood that this alone was insufficient. Repeated works, or practice, is needed to occupy and restrain the mind, and someone's proclivities. Otherwise, they are prone to mouth proclamations of faith, while acting in a very base manner.
Similarly, the doctrine of emptiness has been misunderstood. The strict definition of emptiness is to be empty of permanence. Everything changes. Yet, the doctrine of emptiness has been seized upon to justify acting like a complete ass. Just as the Japanese during WW II; the sword is empty, you are empty, I am empty. So, I can kill you, no problem. Yet Bodhidharma condemned these people. In the Bloodstream Sermon, he says, "Still others commit all sorts of evil deeds, claiming karma doesn't exist. They erroneously maintain that since everything is empty committing evil isn't wrong. Such persons fall into a hell of endless darkness with no hope of release. Those who are wise hold no such conception." 
It's quite sad, in a way. Just before getting to a mountain of riches, followers in both paths are fooled into taking a wrong turn by the misapplication of ideas. Christ and Shakyamuni Buddha would agree; such people have no share in the kingdom of heaven, lost as they are in the labyrinth of wrong ideas.
Jesus said a bad tree does not bear good fruit. If the fruit of your actions is debasement, sorrow, and alienation, maybe a reexamination of your ideas is in order. Shakyamuni would have heartily agreed.

Give an Inch...

Now I'm getting really hot under the collar. A lot of people are fulminating about how God didn't protect the children of Newtown because, "He isn't allowed in public schools."
There are so many fallacies wrapped up in this one simple statement, it's hard to know where to begin. Blaming the victims, a 'God of the gaps' logic, ignoring the fact that the victims involved were undoubtedly Christian, etc. But what burns my butt the most about this statement is the clear direction it faces. It, and the people who utter it, ultimately want to subsume the entire fabric of this country under the dominance of Judeo-Christian thinking.
Let's face it; Christians, especially fundamentalist Baptist-types, always find something to complain about. Okay, fine; let's assume that prayer is officially endorsed in public schools (children are allowed to pray in school, it should be noted. Just not officially promoted). What would happen? There would be another shooting massacre, of course, because guns are awash everywhere in this country, while services for mental illness are not. Then what would the bible-thumpers say? "Well, obviously it's because not everyone in the school believed in Jesus. If those children had been converted, this would never have happened."
This kind of logic can go on and on, because there really is no end-point with it, except that everyone is baptized Christian, the government scraps the Constitution and endorses theocracy, and the USA as it is now ceases to exist, along with minority rights. Does anyone seriously think that if official school prayer is endorsed, that Christians would stop harping about the "lack of God" in this country? In this, the most religious country in the Western industrialized world?
If you follow this logic to its end, then to be safe, we'd all have to be praying all the time everywhere. Do people pray on the freeway? If not, better watch out; God won't be there and then you're bound to have an accident. On the job? Let's hope your surgeon prays in the operating theater, otherwise, you're not going to make it. Eventually, the argument brings itself to reductio ad abdsurdum.
So please, let's avoid blaming the victims here along with trying to promote our political strategies. The best thing is to bow one's head in mourning, in sympathy, and say nothing at all. However, if you're so inclined and you really want to pray, you can do as Jesus instructed, "...when you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you, and pray to your Father in private."

What Center?

For anyone who's ever read any of Pema Chodron's books, there's a familiar theme. It's the theme of no exit, of groundlessness, of not clinging to hope. Not in a negative, nihilistic way, but in a way that says once you surrender to groundlessness, you'll feel grounded, and you'll be liberated.

Taijiquan is very similar, I thought this morning as I was walking back from practice. In the practice of the form, it's very easy to feel a feeling of stolidity, of being a mountain. However, once you enter into the realm of pushing hands, you find that this relaxed feeling of being a mountain gets you pushed all over the place. In essence, there is no fixed place, no center.

One push-hands partner of mine at our Sunday Meetup group would start to roll-back as I began my push towards her, but then sink into a horse stance. She had a karate background, so it was a natural response, but I realized that she was sinking into more than just a physical stance. She was sinking into a feeling of stolidity, retreating to an idea of groundedness. She wanted to feel immovable, to feel safe.

Buddhism and taiji are the same in that they offer no sure havens. In Buddhism, you get rocked on your cushion as you sit with all your ideas; dashed hopes, dreams that didn't fructify, all sorts of ideas about yourself. In push-hands, you learn that resisting the forces on you only make them all the more powerful, that you cannot always stand against the outside. In both instances, you have to yield. On the cushion, you yield to the idea and let it pass unhindered, and in taiji you yield to the push and let it move you. 

The Art of War states that, "...if the enemy is quietly encamped, he can be forced to move." Therefore, the idea of stability in itself carries within it the seed of instability. Falling back like my partner onto something that feels always stable has within it the potential to be moved.

The Buddhist and the taiji practitioner first try to accord his or herself with the idea of being moved. No one likes it, but it's inevitable, and one may as well get comfortable with the idea. After long practice, and acceptance of being moved, one is moved less and less. Finally, one day, it appears to the outside observer that the practitioner cannot be moved at all. They still can, of course, but they move along with "it" so well that it appears as if they are unmoved, as if they are unperturbed. 

Sink first into this leg, than that one. Let this idea arise, and then watch it fall. Hold the center, and move along with it. Therein is liberation.