streaming consciousness…

Updates from hardie karges Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• 

  hardie karges 5:39 am on March 20, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 432 ), capitalism ( 26 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 161 ), craving ( 15 ), demmocracy, desire ( 4 ), Hardie Karges ( 243 ), triple religion   

  Caveat Emptor: Buddhism’s Fine Print… 

  

  

  You can spend your life pursuing objects of craving, or you can reduce your need for them. Christianity or Buddhism? Your choice. And yes, it’s really that simple, almost. The Buddhist Precepts and the Christian Ten Commandments are almost exactly the same, after all. And other differences purported if not actually reported are a little bit harder to define, like the bit about passion and dispassion. Now I fully trust my sense of that, but it is a harder point to sharpen, and anyway doesn’t make so much difference for the average individual living his daily life.

  Then there’s the question of a creator God, which is probably as much a thorn in the side of many Christians as the question of rebirth is for many Buddhists, which is the role of belief and superstition in the practice of either. And so, once again, the similarities abound. But the opposites are palpable. To crave or not? That’s a real difference, and lies at the heart of Buddhism, the disavowal of that. And the desire for that lies at the heart of the Triple Religion that we might call Christianity-Democracy-Capitalism, my term, not to be confused with the Triple Religion of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, which is often invoked for China and sometimes Vietnam, at least before Communism.

  But few choices are truly binary in real life, even if the issues involved often are. To desire or not desire? I think that I might be able to divide my time appropriately between the two. After all Buddhism is built on a Middle Path between extremes, the worst of either to be avoided, while the best of both are to be imbibed of judiciously, with neither lack nor excess. And if this ultimately involves the mixing of religions, then so be it, as long as it’s articulated, so that we’re not pretending that grace, forgiveness, and passion are at the heart of Buddhism. They aren’t. That’s Christianity. So mix in equal portions, like salt and pepper. And there might even be a new Triple Religion possible, Buddhism-Democracy-Socialism, sounds good to me.

   

  Reply Cancel reply

  Required fields are marked *

  Name *

  Email *

  Website

  Notify me of new comments via email.

  Notify me of new posts via email.

  Δ

• 

  hardie karges 6:41 am on March 13, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: CHRISTIANITY ( 161 ), dukkha ( 15 ), emptiness ( 30 ), eternity ( 4 ), infinity ( 8 ), shunyata ( 23 ), suffering ( 28 )   

  Hawking’s Paradox and Buddhism: Emptiness Ain’t so Empty… 

  

  

  Continued from July 4, 2021…

  Buddhism is not a religion of passion. So, there’s no reason to get excited. Unless you’re talking about ‘passion’ in the classic Biblical sense of ‘suffering,’ in which case Buddhism certainly recognizes that sort of passion. But that’s not what Westerners, usually Christian born-and-bred, usually mean. And so, as language mutates over time, so does culture. Christianity’s foundation as a religion built on suffering gradually becomes a religion based on “living life to the fullest,” which is all well and good, if you are prepared to accept the consequences. But Buddhism is all about living life to the Emptiest, and that doesn’t mean Nothingness. It means no craving or grasping.

  On the contrary Emptiness is the only glimpse of Infinity and Eternity that we can have in this life, in this world. Because a world of stuff is by definition limited, to this and that and the other, things countable and categorizable. Emptiness, on the other hand, has no limits. There’s only one problem, if you’re into stuff: it’s empty. But can it be perceived? Yes, I think it can. But it can’t be consumed, not in the way that we consume sights and sounds and love on the rebound. That is the world of stuff. But that world is secondary. Without the Emptiness that contains it, that world is not even possible. Emptiness is a vessel, and thus more important and primal than the stuff that it contains—including your illusory self…
   
• 

  hardie karges 8:40 am on March 6, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 432 ), enlightenment ( 13 ), Jain ( 5 ), JESUS ( 21 ), Putin ( 3 ), rishi ( 7 ), Zeno;s Paradox   

  Buddhism in the Bardo: War is Hell 

  

  

  If you win an argument, then you haven’t really won much. If you win a battle, you’ve won even less. Nobody wins unless we all win. And this is especially true in times of war, when everything you love is on the table (“don’t swallow the cap”) and everything you love is out to sea (The National), and you’re lucky to even find a moment for a sniff between the tears, in which to catch your breath and convince yourself that life is worth living, despite any evidence to that effect.

  But instinct tells you to keep on keeping on, since to end it all is to end the process of deliberation, also, which is an unforgiveable sin, to end a narrative without closure, to end a story without a suitable reason for ending, which is tantamount to treason, and in violation of the ‘fourth-quarter clause’ which states that every game is winnable if given enough time and given enough grace, and given enough love scattered all over the place, such that any uncertain outcome at least carries with it the possibility of personal redemption, if not outright victory in battle.

  Or you could become a renunciant, in the purest sense, a rishi, or maybe a Jain, if you really need a name, in which none of these concerns should really concern us. After all, what could Putin do if Ukrainians simply refused to cooperate, letting him take whatever he wants, but ultimately refusing to cooperate in the slightest? If you’ve already renounced all family and possessions, then what leverage does he have over you? In this scenario, the ‘I’ at the center of your identity is nothing really, simply a pragmatic and conventional set of characteristics that makes it simpler to order dinner, without really proving much in the process.

  Or you could become a Buddhist, splitting the difference, until there is no difference left to split, like Zeno’s paradoxes, going halfway until you never really get anywhere, or at least not to any final destination. Because where is there to really go, now, anyway? So, you plant seeds in anticipation of a harvest, knowing full well and good that sometimes it doesn’t always work out that way, but so what? Sometimes thy cup runneth over, so hopefully it all balances out, if you know how to deal with that.

  Because the whole rap about ‘living in the present’ is so overblown as to remove much of its shine and luster, which is substantial. And it’s often credited to Buddhism, but I don’t remember the Buddha ever saying anything like that, though the lifestyle might imply it. But Jesus did, that rap about the birds not building barns, yet God still provides for them, EXCEPT that birds DO build barns, though we usually call them ‘nests.’ But that doesn’t mean that they have to be full.

  Our mantra in the West is to ‘live life to the fullest,’ and that is where we often go wrong. Because it neither has to be full nor empty. It merely has to be rewarding in its simplicity. But that is an act of consciousness. The recent discovery that most hippos die as virgins confirms the brute force with which the Alpha male often rules his little kingdom, and hams the harem, while the rest of us get sloppy seconds and a pocketful of tissues. But homo sapiens is defined by consciousness, so that won’t work. Now, somebody go tell Putin, before he kills us all. All he needs is Enlightenment…

   
• 

  hardie karges 7:46 am on February 27, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Black Lives Matter ( 2 ), emptiness ( 30 ), global warming ( 16 ), Hardie Karges ( 243 ), meditation ( 193 ), shunyata ( 23 ), silence ( 13 )   

  Advanced Buddhism: Silence is not Violence 

  

  

  Words once spoken cannot be taken back. Actions once committed cannot be retracted. Silence is better than violence. But this contradicts one of the slogans of the Black Lives Matter movement, of course, that ‘Silence is Violence,’ which, no matter how much I sympathize with that movement, is simply mistaken, as a matter of fact, and definition, not opinion nor political orientation. Of course the BLM people were not thinking of meditative silence, so we’re discussing apples and oranges, really, no matter that silence is strictly still silence, no matter the circumstance. Emptiness is another matter. When the Russian figure skater said she felt ‘empty,’ she wasn’t talking about shunyata, I don’t think.

  It’s almost hard to believe now, but not so long ago, to ‘break the silence’ was a symbol of progress, the buzz of saws and the whir of wheels almost synonymous with the concept of progress, in fact. This was largely due to the influence of the Industrial Revolution, of course, the effects of which are still being calculated each and every day, though now perhaps in a more negative sense, given its almost single-handed cause of what we call Global Warming. Global Warmongering began long before and was probably far more brutal than anything that we can even imagine today, whole villages and towns raided and leveled for the lack of ability to hold ground against the superior technology—horses.     

  So, silence is the way of Buddhism, in more ways than one. Not only is it the foundation of meditation, bit it is the right hand to shunyata, the Emptiness that underlies all existence, the vessel that contains the stuff that we associate with reality, but which isn’t, not really. The vessel is more real than all the stuff inside, whether we call it that or call it light and gravity, or another quark for Mister Mark. The point is that there are things more fundamental to reality than all the stuff we see every day. And silence is more fundamental than all the noise we create. On a more personal level, you don’t need to be aggressive to show displeasure. I recommend the silent treatment. It’s better than the violent treatment.

   
• 

  hardie karges 8:09 am on February 20, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: internet ( 10 ), karma ( 50 ), laptop, Omicron, VPN, WiFi   

  Karma on the Installment Plan—in Nepal… 

  

  

  I’ll change my usual format here today, which typically consists of choosing what I consider to be a pithy quote or two—of my own, of course—and then expound on it or them, in the hope of explaining myself and/or the world, so that it might help someone in their own personal quest for beauty, truth, and goodness. Because sometimes life itself offers succinct little stories that say more than I can say from the depths of my imagination, no matter how hard I try. And I would also like to cross-pollinate my Buddha and travel blogs, too, so this seems like a good opportunity. I’ll just re-blog this there.

  In this case the meat of the subject is the idea that the worst things that happen often bring rich blessings, if one can only find the lesson in the suffering and turn despair into delight with a minimum of delay. This goes to the heart of karma, and gives it new value, so not just a justification of an often unjust status quo which consolidates the wicked in power and reduces social mobility to a minimum. Karma, after all, means ‘acts,’ not ‘fate,’ such that the merit gained from good acts, will come back to bless the actor many times over with benefits from unspecified locations and sources.

  (More …)

  hardie karges is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
  • 

    hardie karges 2:57 am on February 23, 2022 Permalink | Reply

    Reblogged this on Dharma Bums and Fellow Travelers.

• 

  hardie karges 7:45 am on February 13, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: craving ( 15 ), dukkha ( 15 ), Four Noble Truths ( 18 ), impermanence ( 6 ), Science ( 25 ), suffering ( 28 )   

  Buddhism: A Noble Truth or Two (and a few lesser ones)… 

  

  

  Buddha in his Four Noble Truths didn’t say that craving is THE (one and only) cause of dukkha, i.e. suffering. Pali and Sanskrit have no definite articles. But it is certainly one of them, and by the fact that the Buddha mentioned no others right then and there, it certainly seems logical to assume that it is perhaps the greatest of them. He did mention others elsewhere, though, and impermanence comes quickly to mind as one of those that he specifically wrote about in that context.

  Perhaps impermanence was Buddha’s first encounter with dukkha? I know that it was mine, at the ripe old age of eight years old, in Jackson, MS, USA, as my parents prepared to migrate from the Big City out to the nearby countryside, and all that I knew and loved would change overnight, perhaps more than can be easily imagined here and now almost sixty years later. Because not only was that my first encounter with suffering of the existential sort, but it was also my first encounter with culture shock. I cried for days, and not only survived but thrived.

  I even started to like that culture shock around the time I visited my twelfth or thirteenth country a few years later. Similarly, the Buddha did not say anything to the effect that ‘all life is suffering.’ But as he listed the various manifestations of suffering, e.g., birth, old age, disease, and death, then that might certainly be implied. That’s what he was obsessed with, most likely, because that’s what he was shielded from for most of his life—until he went outside. And so we must all go outside to find what is inside each of us.

  And what we find inside is another world, a different world, almost another dimension, as different as Virtual Reality from our modern materialistic world of Science. And it is a world of feeling and perception, the only world that a sentient being can truly know. Everything else is only a likely story, and a likeable story at that. You shouldn’t have to choose between Buddhism and Science. You don’t. And sometimes short-term suffering brings the greatest long-term benefits. Don’t panic. Be patient. Be kind and adapt to changing circumstances. Impermanence shouldn’t be a cause of suffering.

   
• 

  hardie karges 8:08 am on February 6, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 432 ), Four Noble Trutrhs, karma ( 50 ), Middle Path ( 55 ), rebirth ( 37 ), religion ( 158 )   

  Buddhism and the Path Forward… 

  

  

  I’m willing to forego some pleasure, if that means I can forego some pain. And that’s the Buddhist Middle Path in a nutshell, if you like nuts. Because that was the dilemma Siddhartha Gautama was faced with, before he was the Buddha, as a prince of the ksatriya (warrior) caste, most likely, and with all the luxury that life can bring. Until one day, that is, when he ventured outside his harem and realized with a shock that real people, those without harems, also suffer sin, disease and death, not to mention old age, which is possibly the worst of all, or so I hear, haha…

  And from that stark realization, of our impermanence and our imperfection, was born the foundation of Buddhism, the Middle Path to avoid suffering. Some people say that Karma, Rebirth, and the resulting past lives are the bedrock of Buddhism. They’re wrong. The later Mahayanists came up with a slightly different Middle Path, translated from different Sanskrit words, that means the path between existence and non-existence, but that came later, by around five hundred years, give or take a century. Indians hated writing things down, for reasons best left to idle conjecture, since if there was a reason to be known, then it likely would have been written.

  The way to avoid, mitigate, and hopefully even cease suffering, if not actually cure it, is to first cease craving, of course. Because if this is a world of suffering, then it is also a world of desire, and that is no coincidence, they locked in a dance to the death that largely defines our dimension—of suffering. If that sounds pessimistic, then I would urge you to check your American Express gold card at the door and contemplate your own death for only a second. Because that length of time is enough to show you that you are not the master of the Universe, nor even your own fate. At best you are only the master of your emotions, and that is where Buddhism does its best work. Before Enlightenment save the world. After Enlightenment save the world. It beats chopping wood—sometimes…

   
• 

  hardie karges 7:45 am on January 30, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Eightfold Path ( 17 ), Four Noble Truths ( 18 ), Pali ( 20 ), Right Speech ( 5 ), samma vaca ( 8 ), Sanskrit ( 22 )   

  Buddhism 101: Do the Right Thing, Quietly… 

  

  

  To do the right thing isn’t always easy. Do it anyway: samma-ditthi, samma-sankappa, samma-vaca, samma-kammanta, samma-ajiva, samma-vayama, samma-sati, samma-samadhi, often translated as Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration, though I’m not sure what the difference is between Right Understanding and Right Thought. But I do know that Right View is often substituted for one or the other of them, I assume the first, since the modern Nepali translation of ‘view’ is drsya, and probably better for the very reason of its distinction from ‘thought.’

  And then there are those who would object to the translation of ‘samma’ as ‘right,’ though for what reason I can’t remember now, and probably misguided, if we remember that ‘right’ in this case is in the context of ‘appropriate,’ which would agree nicely with that word’s derivation in modern standard Thai, which has probably half of its words derived from Pali and/or Sanskrit.

  Re-translation is the curse of modern-day Buddhism, especially American-based Buddhism, which must reconcile ancient Indian thought derived from deep contemplation with modern critical analysis largely derived from empirical testing on one hand, and the faddish trends of fashion on the other, and the need for brief sound bites with universal happy endings, perfect for mass consumption.

  And that’s fine, since Buddhism is an ongoing dialog, or dialectic, in constant search of a higher truth, those first Four Noble ones and that ensuing Eightfold Path but the starting point for further developments and the groundwork for the Precepts, that were once typically translated as Commandments for simplicity of reason, faith and understanding. All religions seem to need tenets, even when they are almost identical, since most people need constant reminding of even the simplest things in life.

  For example: Samma Vaca, Right Speech, is not just for your friends, but your enemies, too, and strangers unnamed and uncounted. Obvious, right? But until someone articulates that most important point, then it might very well go unnoticed by most typical text-skimmers. Less obvious is that all this verbiage is excessive, and should be unnecessary, except for our habits of point and counterpoint, parry and thrust. Buddhism is a religion and philosophy of silence, at the core of its being and existence. Silence is normal. All noise should be treated as an alien force, approached with caution and handled with great care.

   
• 

  hardie karges 7:00 am on January 23, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 432 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 161 ), defilement ( 3 ), dharma ( 35 ), kilesha ( 11 ), love ( 49 ), lovingkindness ( 16 ), metta ( 25 ), religion ( 158 )   

  Buddhism and the True Meaning of Love 

  

  

  ‘Falling in Love’ is all about attachment. True love is all about non-attachment. True love looks for soft spots to protect. Aggression looks for soft spots to attack, and attachment isn’t much better, by weakening that spot, even if not physically attacking. By ‘true love,’ of course, I’m talking about Buddhist metta, typically translated as ‘lovingkindness,’ if you’re Jewish or Christian, but that still preserves some passion, and suffering, so maybe better translated more like the Buddha himself probably intended, so something like ‘brotherly love’ or ‘sisterly love,’ as the case may be. To be clear, I think that being in a relationship is fine, sometimes wonderful, but it shouldn’t necessarily be based on the hysterical (no pun) madness of being ‘in love.’

  Score one for arranged marriages? I wouldn’t go that far. Exercising one’s innate free will, to whatever extent it exists, and despite all the limitations placed upon it, is all about what it is to be human. ‘Give me liberty or give me death’? Haha, once again, I probably wouldn’t go that far. Because true freedom is freedom FROM, not freedom TO, freedom from any and all the defilements that plague us, but not freedom to do anything we want, regardless of whom it hurts. And this is an important distinction. Kileshas are the Buddhist name for those defilements that destroy our humanity and reduce us once again to the animal world from which we’ve evolved.

  It’s funny, though, because often these defilements themselves come paired just like the pair-bonding couples that cause many of the problems in their quest for reproduction rights, in addition to other attachments and liens on property. Because jealousy and revenge are twin kileshas, just like hate and anger, one feeding off the other like two heads of a serpent striking, and best avoided. The great Buddhist dilemma, or tetralemma, is how to deal with aggression. Do you turn the other cheek? But no Christian really did that, did they? To live from sensation to sensation is to live like an animal. To follow dharma is to live like a human.

   
• 

  hardie karges 8:05 am on January 16, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Amazon ( 2 ), global warming ( 16 ), Hippocratic Oath ( 3 ), karma ( 50 ), meditation ( 193 ), monks, Newton's third law ( 2 )   

  Buddhism in the Modern Era 

  

  

  Some people might laugh at a monk in meditation, wasting his life away, but I laugh at the silly fools who cause global warming. Because they are the ones that are not only wasting their lives, and themselves, but they are destroying the world for the rest of us, also, and that is a crime that should be punishable to the maximum extent of the law. Meditation is no crime, regardless of whether you think it does anyone any good or not. It certainly does no one any harm, and that’s the Hippocratic Oath, primum non nocere…

  So why do it? The short answer is for the peace of mind, of course, and that should be plenty. But the industrialists and capitalists are hooked on growth like Skid Row addicts on the junk and other trash that populates so much of our lives. Beauty is so much better, and it is absolutely free, costing nothing in the backyard garden and not much more in Amazon, which in reality is a jungle in the South American heart of darkness, which really isn’t so dark at all, in fact a veritable paradise and biology lab par excellence…

  But the Truth, Beauty, and Goodness implicit in the state of Nature are wasted on people who only judge value by dollar signs and Yelp (!) reviews. Because that is a world that means little in the final analysis of man’s involvement with his planet. Karma may be a sketchy concept, but that sketch packs a powerful punch: we reap what we sow, somehow some way, and that murkiness is important. Because the fact that every action has an equal effect is not karma; that’s Newton’s 3^rd Law. That every action has an indirect, perhaps greater, effect is karma, and that’s dharma, law, religion, you name it…