Does Buddhism need the supernatural stuff?
Does Buddhism need the supernatural stuff? |
- Does Buddhism need the supernatural stuff?
- Video: Pat Robertson advocates destroying Buddha statues
- Dalai Lama passes on self-immolation question, citing retirement from politics
- Congressman Tim Ryan to talk “A Mindful Nation” at InsightLA fundraiser, June 4
- Reconnecting with essence-love: A new interview with Tsoknyi Rinpoche
| Does Buddhism need the supernatural stuff? Posted: 18 May 2012 09:00 AM PDT by Andrew Brown, The Guardian, 17 May 2012
As the Dalai Lama is feted at St Paul's, a more low-key Buddhist will debate with a secular Christian the appeal of truth over myth London, UK -- This week has been bookended with two notable Buddhist events. On Monday the Dalai Lama was presented with his Templeton prize at a ceremony in St Paul's. On Sunday, in a rather more low-key event, Stephen Batchelor and Don Cupitt will be debating with Madeleine Bunting the possibility of religion without supernaturalism at Friends House on Euston Road in London.
Cupitt is a Christian, of sorts: at least, he's an ordained Anglican priest. But he believes almost nothing of traditional Christianity. "The whole system of Christian doctrine is a somewhat haphazard human construct with an all-too-human history, and … the Bible, when read closely, does not actually teach – nor even support – orthodox doctrine." Batchelor, similarly, trained for 10 years as a Buddhist monk in Dharamsala, the headquarters of the exiled Dalai Lama, but believes few of the central doctrines of traditional Buddhism. "The kind of secular Buddhism I am interested in … entails a rethinking of Buddhism from the ground up. And what emerges from this reconfiguration of core values and ideas might not look anything like the Buddhism we are familiar with today."
For both men, the appeal of Buddhism is that it is concerned with truth, rather than myth structures. Follow certain practices and you will come to understand more deeply certain essential truths about the world. It's a method in some ways like the scientific method, but with the inestimable and essential advantage that Buddhism has morality built in. It is an explanation of the moral facts of the world. It makes no sense for them to claim that religions could ever be morally neutral, in the way that people think of technology. They can be, and often are, morally appalling. But they can't be simply neutral. Prayer and contemplation change people irrevocably. A surprising amount of this is compatible with perfectly orthodox Christianity and, for all I know, Buddhism. The emphasis on truth, rather than faith, is certainly a mark of all the interesting Christian thinkers that I know. But I wonder whether the project of secularising religion like this will ever be more than a minority pursuit. Watching the ceremony in St Paul's, and listening to the Dalai Lama earlier, I felt the faint proddings of my inner Rupert Murdoch. When he described the Dalai Lama as "a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes", he was of course defending his imperialist allies in the Chinese government. But he had a point. At the press conference in the crypt of St Paul's we listened to the Dalai Lama explaining that he was perfectly ordinary, just one of 7 billion human beings, yet almost everyone in the room – even Arianna Huffington – addressed him as "Your Holiness". Who, here, was fooling whom? I don't doubt that the Dalai Lama is a good man, a profound thinker and a skilled statesman. He deserves his prizes. But a huge part of his popularity in the west stems from the deracination of his doctrines. They appear far more secular and far less supernaturalist over here than they actually are when lived out among Tibetans. More seriously, traditional Buddhist language is full of false friends when translated into English: words that sound the same but mean something very different. When the Buddhist says that the root of happiness is "self-confidence", he sounds like the worst sort of business guru. He answered one question about how he could bear all the suffering in the world by saying that "self-confidence is the key factor. The basis of self-confidence is honest truth. These things I myself learned to be the case. Living as a Buddhist monk, as a practitioner, [I have been] always honest, truthful." But the kind of self-confidence – indeed, the kind of self – produced by life in a monastery is not going to have much in common with the kinds produced by life in a western economy. One of the central religious yearnings is for platitudes to be true: wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all get along. And since, for the most part, the aspirations of religion towards charity are not realised in the world around us, they need to be cast in terms of another world. That is what supernaturalism does, and it is what the exoticism of Buddhism in the west accomplishes, too. I wish Batchelor, Cupitt, and Madeleine Bunting well. But I doubt their teachings will ever fill St Paul's. Read More @ Source"Morality" by Ajahn Brahmali 
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| Video: Pat Robertson advocates destroying Buddha statues Posted: 17 May 2012 08:00 PM PDT Watch this video published yesterday by RightWingWatch.org: I have two reactions to this. What are yours? My first reaction is, Who in hell does Pat Robertson think he is? The second is, Who in hell does Pat Robertson think Buddhists are? He seems to think we're the enemy. Well, we're not the enemy, Pat. Buddhists are concerned with eliminating suffering, and deepening and harnessing our compassion. For ourselves, and for others. Including you. Or at least we're trying. And those statues of ours? All they are to us, really, are reminders of that. Those statues help us to think about and re-engage with our motivation to eliminate suffering, and to deepen and harness our compassion. You can destroy them, but it won't change a thing. Read More @ Source
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| Dalai Lama passes on self-immolation question, citing retirement from politics Posted: 17 May 2012 01:00 PM PDT
"All over Tibetan areas, Tibetans have been setting fire to themselves – self-immolating in protest against Chinese rule. Can you tell us whether you think that they should stop this now, or should they continue?" After a brief pause, His Holiness replied, "I think that is a quite sensitive political issue. I think my answer should be zero." The reporter, not expecting this, inquired further with, "You have no message for them? Your people?" His Holiness continued, "Since last year, I retired from political responsibility. Not only myself retired, but also almost 4 centuries old tradition of the Dalai Lama institution. [Inaudible]…that [has] now ended. So, in that sense, now I become truly a simple Buddhist monk. No answer." You can watch a video of this exchange from CNN below. (Photo by www.buddhismus.at via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.) Read More @ SourceJackie Chan Adventures Season 3 Episode 16 Tohru Who? 1/3 
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| Congressman Tim Ryan to talk “A Mindful Nation” at InsightLA fundraiser, June 4 Posted: 17 May 2012 11:00 AM PDT
The fundraiser is scheduled for Monday, June 4 at 7:30 p.m. at The Broad Stage, 1310 11th Street, Santa Monica. Tickets for the event are on a sliding scale between $ 40 and $ 120, and are available here. For more on Ryan, click through here to watch the A Mindful Nation trailer, with a transcription of Ryan's interview following. And look for Andrea Miller's new Q&A with the Congressman in the coming, July 2012 Shambhala Sun magazine, on newsstands in the first week of June.
That's just a sample of what Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan has to say about mindfulness in the video trailer for his book A Mindful Nation, published earlier this year. (We've included a transcription, below, as well.) Ryan also talks about his own experience with mindfulness and how the practice has the potential of making a tremendous difference for our society. Ryan was also keynote speaker at last month's International Symposia for Contemplative Studies. Click here to watch video from the conference online. Transcript: "Growing up I spent about 12 years in Catholic school—Our Lady of Mount Carmel grade school, and John F. Kennedy Catholic High School—and I remember on numerous occasions being told by the nuns and the brothers and the teachers to pay attention. No one ever taught us how to pay attention, and one of the things that I really like about the practice of mindfulness, and moving this into the field of education—teaching our teachers about mindfulness and social and emotional learning, teaching our students how to practice mindfulness—is you're actually giving them a technique, and a skill set, on how to mobilize their attention, and place it on a problem that they're dealing with in their classroom. "Or to listen to their teachers. And mindfulness teaches these kids how to pay attention. It teaches them how they are connected to other people, and how to be kind to other people, and to see the problems that other people may be dealing with, and then understand that in a more compassionate way. "Mindfulness can be a great opportunity for us as a country, for all of us to develop this skill in some way, improve our performance… but there's some fundamental things that are essential to that, and it's the ability to concentrate, to relax, to be aware, and to cultivate and develop these skills; they're going to improve your performance, regardless of what you are trying to do. And mindfulness, in my estimation, doing a lot of work in Congress, and traveling a lot, and playing sports, and all of these things… there's something fundamental underneath all of those activities, and paying attention, and being aware, and having a reduced stress level, helps in all of those situations. And I think this is going to have transformational effects on our education system. "I don't care how much money we spend on education, it doesn't matter what programs we're trying to teach our kids… if they don't have the fundamental building block of learning, which is being able to control your attention span, all the rest is not going to be effective. And mindfulness teaches these kids how to pay attention. It teaches them how they are connected to other people, and how to be kind to other people, and to see the problems that other people may be dealing with, and then understand that in a more compassionate way. "So mindfulness, I believe, is already having transformational effects in classrooms in Youngstown, in Northern Ohio, and all across the country, but we need to ramp it up, [the understanding that] this fundamental skill of paying attention is essential to us transforming our education system. And I can't think of anyone in my congressional district, or across the country, who's not, in this day and age, experiencing very high levels of stress—with their families, with their kids, with their job, if they have a son or daughter in the military, or someone who has returned from serving the country, or a variety of situations where the stress level is just so high… "And the news that we watch on TV is feeding us a lot of negative information, and a lot of fear, and a lot of things that just ramp up our stress level. We're not sleeping at night. Most people aren't getting a good night's sleep. Most people are dealing with this high level of stress in ways that maybe aren't the healthiest. Mindfulness is a way for us to reduce our stress level in a way, by just taking a few minutes a couple of times a day, or once a day, or one minute once a day, or just anytime where you can just stop and slow down… you are contributing to your own health. And if we can build a healthcare system where people are participating in their own healthcare by helping reduce their own stress levels –- [which] lead to heart disease, and a variety of other ailments that we're trying to deal with as a country, that get very, very expensive to deal with… Mindfulness is about us teaching others this technique to reduce their own stress levels, take ownership of their own health, help us reduce overall costs for healthcare expenditures, and improve the quality of their own life. "You know, some people wonder if the promotion of mindfulness by a member of the United States Congress is somehow a political risk, but we need to stop and think about what we're talking about here. We're asking people to slow down a little bit; most people want to find a way to do that. We're asking people not to get too caught up in the past or the future and be where they are, whether they're with their kids, or their grandparents, or the work that they're doing. Most people are okay with that. We're asking people to learn how to pay attention. We want to teach our kids how to develop their attention span. I think that's something that everybody in the country wants. "We're asking people to recognize situations that their friends and neighbours and fellow citizens are in, and be understanding of that, and be compassionate of that. Mindfulness cultivates all of these qualities. "And once I had the personal experience myself at an extended five-day silent retreat, and you practice and meet people who are implementing mindfulness programs in the military, in our education system, in our healthcare system, for our veterans, for our family caregivers. And seeing these programs have a profound effect on people who are working in very high levels of stress burnout in their jobs – if they're nurses, or firefighters, or police officers—and [that] this is able to reduce their stress, and improve their performance. When I saw all this, and had a personal experience myself, I felt like I would be derelict in my duty as a United States Congressman if I didn't try to push this stuff out into society. "We've got a responsibility when we get sworn in as a member of Congress to try to help our constituents, and to help our country, and to know and to have personal experience of programs that are actually going to transform our country at a very fundamental level. There's no way you can see all that, and experience all that, and then ignore it and put it on the back burner and say, 'That's for another day.' "Our country is going through too much right now. Our soldiers are suffering too much. Parents and teachers, all down the line, and now is the time for us to implement this. It's not the 99% against the 1%, it's about the 100%, all of us together. And when we all move in concert in the same direction we have success as a country. And we have quality of life, and a higher standard of living, and more happy citizens. And so, to me a 'Mindful Nation' is a nation where we are connected, and we care about each other, and we're willing to do what it takes to help our neighbor. And really, to embody something that I know we all believe, and that's that we are our brothers' and our sisters' keepers."—US Congressman Tim Ryan (D) Ohio Read More @ Source
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| Reconnecting with essence-love: A new interview with Tsoknyi Rinpoche Posted: 17 May 2012 10:00 AM PDT
This Thursday, May 17th, His Eminence the Third Drubwang Tsoknyi Rinpoche will visit Los Angeles at the invitation of InsightLA, where he will participate in an evening of conversation with Sharon Salzberg. (Tickets for the event are available here.) The visit is part of a tour for his new book Open Mind, Open Heart: Awakening the Power of Essence Love. (You can read an excerpt in the May 2012 issue of Shambhala Sun and in abridged form online). Rinpoche is guiding teacher of the Pundarika Foundation and the son of the late, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche (1920-1996), one of the most remarkable Kagyu/Nyingma masters of the last century. He is also the brother of renowned Buddhist masters Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, Tsikey Chokling Rinpoche, and Mingyur Rinpoche. This teaching coming up at InsightLA will be done with Sharon Salzberg. I'm seeing this phenomenon more and more: Buddhist teachers working with a partner, often across traditions. What does co-teaching in general and with Sharon offer you?
Sharon's teachings are based in the Theravada teachings, and in the Theravada teachings there are many good mindfulness practices, and those are very helpful in the world now. I think advanced mindfulness practices are very close to Dzogchen: it goes beyond conceptual limitations. In the Theravada view, we try to train our conceptual mind, and then, at the end, we dissolve the conceptual mind and go into the infinite openness, or emptiness. So I think Theravada teachings and Dzogchen go together very well. And, then, of course, Sharon as a person is a lovely teacher and we work together very happily and nicely. So I think working with her is very good. In terms of dharma and who she is as a person, she is amazing. In your teaching with Sharon, and also in your latest book, you talk quite a bit about "essence-love." Would you say more about this? In general, there are four kinds of love. The first is essence-love; the second is our normal, samsara love; third is wounded love; and fourth is Buddhist love, or boundless love. In samsara love, things are very conditioned, based on a subject-object kind of relationship, with fear and hope—we lose the basic wellbeing of unconditional essence-love in the high-speed, objectifying kind of society. My basic point is that we have to reconnect with this essence-love, which is not necessarily giving-love or a love where you're expressing something, but just the basic wellbeing. In the center of the feeling, there's love—that love is part of buddhanature. Buddhanature is clear, empty love. This love is part of an emotion, which is a very healthy one. But this essence-love can become too conditioned, and we try to cut that off. So I try to reconnect that essence-love—not from outside, but within the mind and within feeling and the body. There are a lot of blockages, and we're trying to open up the blockages and find space for the essence-love. Then we can experience essence-love in our feeling. I put out calls on Twitter and Facebook, asking for questions others had for you. Overwhelmingly, people wanted to hear your thoughts about the growth and development of Buddhism in the America.
After about twenty years in the West, I can see that students see a difference between the dharma—the core dharma—and the method, which is connected with the culture presenting the dharma. I think we need to change the method. So what I'm doing in the West is not changing the core, real dharma, but I'm trying to make it more accessible, easy to understand; I'm trying to use current culture to understand real Dharma. I think I have an ability to see people's background, baggage, and understanding in modern society, and also the older Asian culture. That helps me to see how to bring Dharma into their lives, and realize their innermost wisdom. If I don't understand the culture—whether we're talking about European culture, or Japanese culture, or Chinese culture, or modern culture broadly—it's very hard to bring Dharma into people's lives. What has been helpful for you as a teacher in terms of understanding other cultures and contexts? Traditionally, in the Buddha's time, one of the qualifications of a teacher was to be clairvoyant—to know others' mental dispositions. But I'm not clairvoyant, so I use my own method to talk to people, and make my own special effort to be aware of the country or culture or school system or family and how that shifts from person to person or place to place. If I have special students, the first thing I do is talk with them about their culture, their way of life, what blockages they feel they have, and what good things they feel they have. Through that, I understand the problem; then, according to that, I give a Dharma remedy for them. Otherwise, it's kind of a Dharma bypass, you know? I would say something, but they would have some other problem. Or maybe my understanding would be different from theirs. So in the teaching I have a lot of discussion, and I watch their faces, movements, expressions, words; through that I understand where they are, and I know what to do with that more or less. Rinpoche, you've been very involved in neuroscientific and mental health research. How has all that work, and what you've learned from it, affected you in the work you do as a Dharma teacher? I went to a few of the Mind & Life Institute's conferences, and met students from that part of the world, and realized that the influence from the mind is very strong on what we Buddhists would call the "subtle body." Our "subtle body" too has an influence on our mind. So I think Buddhist practice needs cognitive stability—focused attention, awareness, and mindfulness. They're also very healthy for our mind and brain. That goes to our emotional brain, and so when emotional hijacking happens, if our thinking brain is stable, they will not be so strong. So I see these worlds helping each other. Compassion, loving-kindness… those are the emotional practices. Those are really helpful to open up the heart and finding the essence-love. They also change our emotional lives. Then, through the practices of cognitive awareness, attention, mindfulness, these things all come together. When you're more emotionally healthy, your subtle body will radiate into the gross body, upwards. Everything will become stronger, you will become more resistant to disease, and so on. So I'm very interested in all the research and work in these areas. People also asked me to ask you is about the Nangchen nuns of your lineage. The documentary Blessings tells their story, and people wanted updates in light of all the upheaval in Tibet in the last couple of years. Can you share anything with us about the Tsokyni lineage nuns of Nangchen?
Because of the location in Nangchen, high in the mountains, they are quite safe. They're not involved in politics either. They're practitioners high in the mountains. From a political point of view, they're quite OK and safe. But more and more families there are moving to larger towns, so the nuns have less and less support. I'm trying to create an endowment for them, so that we can help with emergencies and relief and care for older nuns and do all we can to make their lives more secure financially. In addition, Gebchak, the gompa that we call "the Mother of All the Nunneries," is trying to build a main temple or shrine hall. Pundarika will try to help the nuns with resources in the best way it can over the next years with food, medicine and basic buildings. From our side, we're doing that; from their side, they're doing practice very well. There are about 700 nuns in three-year retreat, 40-50 in lifelong retreat, and close 3,000 in residence. Is there any practice or teaching you can leave our readers with?
Essence-love is very important. But in order to experience essence-love, I think we have to de-solidify ego fixation. We also have to find inner space. Inner space is like the mother, and essence-love is like the child. There are practices in my book. Read More @ Source
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