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  hardie karges 10:23 am on June 13, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: beauty, Buddhism ( 432 ), catuskoti ( 4 ), Donald Trump ( 29 ), goodness ( 2 ), logic ( 14 ), philosophy ( 104 ), Plato ( 17 ), religion ( 158 ), tetralemma ( 9 ), truth   

  Buddhism in the Facebook Era: Truth Falls Flat in the Face of Entertainment 

  

  

  I’ve often said that the ultimate quest in a human’s life—my life—is for truth, beauty and goodness, with the implication being that this is the proper field of inquiry for religion and philosophy. But is that what really happens? Beauty isn’t so hard nor controversial, since we tend to all have similar views on what inspires feelings of beauty, if not art, within us, and not dissimilar to the quick and easy Internet definition on MS Bing: “a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight.”

  That sounds about right, now, doesn’t it? And even more so when slightly modified to allow that this combination of qualities might also “please the intellect or moral sense.” Cool. Sounds good to me. I think that we can all agree on that. And the concept of goodness dovetails nicely into that concept of beauty, such that it almost serves the chief purpose of clarifying exactly what we mean when we talk about goodness or simply ‘the good.’ And that’s exactly what the ancient Greek philosophers talked about, they who basically invented the term ‘philosophy,’ and for whom the definition of ‘goodness’ was something like: “you’ll know it when you see it.”

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  hardie karges 11:18 am on June 6, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 432 ), chesed ( 2 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 161 ), Indus Valley ( 2 ), Kama Sutra, lovingkindness ( 16 ), Malcolm Gladwell, metaphysics ( 5 ), metta ( 25 ), passion ( 9 ), philosophy ( 104 ), religion ( 158 ), suffering ( 28 ), Vedantic, Vedic ( 5 )   

  Buddhist Sutra on Passion and Dispassion… 

  

  

  Now I make no secret of the fact that I don’t think that Buddhism is necessarily any better than any other religion, philosophy, or way of life. But it is the right one for the right time. And it is no accident that it took me more than half my life (and counting) to finally make the switch from an eclectic form of ersatz Christianity to an equally eclectic form of Buddhism, however much more authentic, I reckon. After all I never got my MA in Christian Studies, though I guess all my liberal arts courses and BA in philosophy is probably as much as that, if not more.

  But neither Buddhism nor Christianity exists in a vacuum, so what we get is a mix of the original intent in its original environment, full of causes and conditions, situations and circumstances, inspirations and misgivings, as combined with the mandates of the mandarins, the rulings of the rulers, the laws of the legislators and the cravings of the consumer. Caveat emptor. But the salient point is that both are but the metaphysical underpinnings and psychological overtones of something much larger, equally symbolic and patently manifest.

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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 ( 47 ), matrices, Mogao Caves, Sanskrit ( 22 ), 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 ( 10 ), Buddha ( 49 ), change ( 5 ), Echkart Tolle, Einstein ( 11 ), global warming ( 16 ), Hawking, JESUS ( 21 ), Mahayana ( 47 ), 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 ( 432 ), DNA ( 45 ), freedom ( 13 ), 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 ( 50 ), 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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  hardie karges 12:26 pm on April 25, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Brahmanism ( 8 ), Buddhism ( 432 ), Carvakas, cosmological constant ( 2 ), Einstein ( 11 ), Gosala, Jainism ( 13 ), karma ( 50 ), language ( 147 ), Nepali, Predeterminism, rebirth ( 37 ), reincarnation ( 14 ), Vedic ( 5 )   

  Karma, Rebirth, and the Middle Path of Buddhism 

  

  

  Karma is not a bank account. Karma is a way to live with right actions. That’s what the word means, in fact, simply ‘actions.’ But somewhere along the way the word got mixed up in the fashions of the day, in 6^th to 8^th century India, Before the Common Era, and the materialistic demands of the Carvakas in contrast to the predeterminism of Gosala, tutor to both the Buddha and Mahavira, 23^rd Tirthankara of the Jains. They were of the extreme ascetic bent, of course, in which Emptiness literally means empty bellies, by willful design, to the point of inanition and even death, for lack of other inspiration.

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  hardie karges 11:32 am on April 18, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: control ( 6 ), Covid-19 ( 5 ), emptiness ( 30 ), freedom ( 13 ), humans ( 2 ), karma ( 50 ), rebirth ( 37 ), samma kamanta ( 2 )   

  Buddhism and the Limits of Freedom… 

  

  

  Self-control is a valuable tool, a wonderful trait, and a noble quality. But control of others? Not so much. And this is a sticking point for many Western Buddhists, who cringe at the thought of any sort of control, it being anathema to the Western traditions of freedom and democracy, however ill-conceived and ill-defined. This obsession with freedom arose in response to the tyranny of rulers, so that is the sordid background upon which our story must unfold. It is also the justification for many a disproportionate response which must then invite further repercussions, in an almost endless back-and-forth see-saw of emotions and cataclysms which define the modern history of humankind.

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  hardie karges 12:24 pm on April 11, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: dialectic ( 13 ), Mahayana ( 47 ), Theravada ( 51 )   

  Buddhism on the Half Shell, Pick and Choose 

  

  

  Make the world a better place for humans and other sentient beings. That is the battle charge of the Bodhisattva, the ‘awakened being’ who sacrifices the present moment of his own bliss for the future happiness of the many in waiting. And this is the difference, of course, between the Buddhism of the Elders, Theravada, and the larger vehicle, Mahayana, which supposedly looks beyond the narrow conflicted self and delays enlightenment so that we all can enter the realm of Buddhahood together.

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