streaming consciousness…

Updates from May, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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  hardie karges 10:42 am on May 31, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Abhidharma ( 5 ), catuskoti ( 4 ), China ( 14 ), Diamond Sutra, Dunhuang, Kumarajiva, Mahayana ( 48 ), matrices, Mogao Caves, Sanskrit ( 23 ), Takla Makan Desert, tetralemma ( 9 ), Xinjiang, Zen ( 31 )   

  New Diamond Sutra: Utility is the Measure of Beauty 

  

  

  Diamond Sutra: So I tell you – Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; A flash of lightning in a summer cloud, A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. When the Buddha finished this Discourse the venerable Subhuti, together with the bhikshus, bhikshunis, lay-brothers and sisters, and the whole realms of Gods, Men and Titans, were filled with joy by His teaching, and, taking it sincerely to heart, they went their ways…

  The Diamond Sutra (Sanskrit: वज्रच्छेदिकाप्रज्ञापारमितासूत्र, Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra) is the oldest printed and dated book in the world, all of which occurred on the 11^th day of May in 868 CE, notwithstanding the fact that the book is certainly older than that. But this is from the first Chinese translation, which occurred c.401CE by the venerable Kumarajiva from Kashmir, one of my Buddhist heroes, while in prison in Xinjiang (sound familiar?), and before he found his place in the capital at Chang’an (now Xi’an). The signed dated copy–for free distribution only–was found in the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang a lttle more than a century ago. Nothing rots in the desert.

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  hardie karges 12:50 pm on May 23, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Alan Watts ( 5 ), anatta ( 22 ), anicca ( 11 ), Buddha ( 49 ), change ( 6 ), Echkart Tolle, Einstein ( 11 ), global warming ( 16 ), Hawking, JESUS ( 21 ), Mahayana ( 48 ), Pandemic ( 9 ), Plato ( 17 ), Wittgenstein, Zen ( 31 )   

  Pandemic Sutra on the Concept of Change in Buddhism 

  

  

  The Buddha wasn’t perfect, and he knew that, regardless of the speculations of some later Mahayanists and their need for transcendent divinity of which the earthly manifestations are just that—nasty, mean, brutish, and short, like life with the sea serpent Leviathan of Hobbes without Calvin. Why else would he have referred to us as no-soul ‘heaps’ of inconsequential ‘skandhas’ with little to commend us but the causes and conditions to which we are subject and of which we are so much a part?

  Zen troublemakers took the Mahayana transcendental position a step further by claiming perfection for all of us, but I’m not sure how that works out except as a point of convergence with some Christian transcendentalists who also think similarly, and so might actually save the world from its own self-destruction if enough people from enough different places could ever agree on any one thing for long enough for us to stop fighting and allow the world to heal from our destructive abuse of it.

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  hardie karges 12:34 pm on May 16, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 456 ), DNA ( 46 ), freedom ( 14 ), frequencies, Kristofferson, Osho ( 3 ), Rajneesh ( 3 ), Stephen Hawking, Transcendental Meditation ( 4 )   

  Hawking Paradox Sutra, the Buddhism of Big Questions… 

  

  

  Stephen Hawking is certainly one of the most interesting figures of the last century, and his previous best-seller A Brief History of Time was certainly a page-turner, if not exactly a nail-biter, so I was excited to have a chance to read his latest, and presumably last (since he is now deceased) offering, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, like, you know: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where do we go now? Who invented ice cream? Why are women so beautiful? Hey, you gotta’ have priorities.

  Backstory: Freedom and the lack thereof is one of my big themes philosophically, and so it is for many of us, generally in the West, and especially in America, to the point that you can’t escape it, even when you are reading Eastern philosophy, especially that of the Indian/Hindu variety, in which pandits and acharyas will go on and on (I would like to say ‘drone’) about you and your boundlessness and your limitlessness, and wouldn’t it be great if you were unstoppable.

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  hardie karges 11:47 am on May 9, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: communes ( 2 ), forgiveness ( 2 ), Fukushima, karma ( 52 ), trash   

  Buddhism and the Myth of the Cosmic Karmic Flush… 

  

  

  We in the Western world are truly mothers of invention and children of it, too, notwithstanding the early achievements of the Chinese and others, with their paradigm-shifting inventions of paper and playing cards and gunpowder and so forth. But somewhere along the way we got the idea that we can throw things away and they somehow just disappear. Now that big (bad) idea may have come with the development of widespread indoor plumbing, but it likely dates back to the beginnings of our species.

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  hardie karges 11:47 am on May 2, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: etymology, parable, parabola, sutra ( 3 )   

  The Parable of Parabolas, Sutra of Sutures, and the boy who liked spicy noodles… 

  

  

  Parables and sutras (or sutta if you’re an adept of Theravada Buddhism) are really the same thing, the former most popularized by Jesus and the latter by the Buddha, though neither is exclusive to either, and neither excludes the other. For I don’t know that any sutra has ever been attributed to Jesus, but I do know that the Buddha has his parables.

  But in reality they’re the same thing, small stories intended to convey some small meaning, but one that might be considered significant, if only one cared to pay some attention to it. For we crave meaning every bit as much as we crave language itself, and the vowels and consonants quickly become subordinate to the verbs and nouns, predicates and subjects that define it. And we love happy endings, so that we can go about our lives with a spring in our step and a smile on our faces, so as to make our lives less miserable.

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