Buddhism in the rainy season…
Kwan Yin (Kuan Im), Sino-Thai Bodhisattva
I love the rainy season. I like the clouds. I like the mist. I like the coolness in the air, evaporative, just add breeze to activate, to keep the heat at bay, to keep the house at beach, and the fever below boiling, to keep the hands out of reach of the hard stuff…
This is the sweet spot, from God’s own hand and Nature’s own palette, automatically activating and infinitely adjustable, in imperfect synchronicity with the hard heavy hot dry season that precedes it, just begging for relief and thirsting for succor…
These are the tropics, where every day is the same but for the thick gray blanket that slides back and forth letting the sun shine in or letting the heat out, like the foam on a head of pale ale that seems to act independently of the frothy sea beneath it…
It’s almost as if there were some signal from above, or some conductor’s baton, or some director’s cue, and all of a sudden the stage hands come in and strike the set, removing summer crops and beachy props and replacing them with rice fields all waiting… (More …)
…something, or other, maybe even the surcease of language, which is what you really want, and need, and find so hard to find, that preliterate programmer’s set-up state before the operating system made your life so easy and your choices so few, and so hard to do without now that you have it, a marriage of convenience but no more spontaneity, and mostly no more emptiness, so worth a stab at forced removal, or at least closure, or at least hibernate the machine with silence, for maybe an hour a day, the more the better…
NO, this is not click-bait; this is Buddhism, and I’m dead serious. 
My name is Hardie and I am a workaholic. I started with the small stuff, house raisings and assorted cabin crew, sharp nails into wood and flesh, before moving on to the harder stuff—self-employment! And business!! Ouch!!! But that was just the warm-up to the true disease, a consistent and constant submission to the little man upstairs, who whispered in my ear little things like: “Have you ever heard of multi-tasking?” And that was my downfall, multiple jobs and multiple careers, all simultaneously and in synchronicity—more or less… 
In the old days of Nikaya Buddhism, in India, before the Common Era, there were at least seventeen schools of Buddhism, chiefly Sthviravada-derived (including Theravada, Sammatiya, Sautrantika, Savarvastivada, Mulasarvastivada, etc.), and Mahasanghika-derived (Yogacara, Madhyamika, etc.), before finally settling into the three broad Theravada, Mahayana, and Tibetan-Esoteric-Vajrayana-Mantrayana ‘schools’ that we know today. Get the picture? Buddhists are not known for doctrinal agreement…
I know it sounds like some silly game show, but it’s true. What each one of us decides to do and accomplish in this short life is largely subject to our own whims and devices, and not subject to judgment, not if there is any justice in this world. After all, the great sages and prophets don’t spend time on that, and all the great commandments, of any great religion, all begin with: “Thou shall not,” (or was it ‘shalt’?), but not “Thou shall…”
I’m paraphrasing, of course, but this is the question that has plagued—no, let’s say intrigued’—the sangha (Buddhist community) for two and a half millennia, more or less, if not in so many words, then in so many actions, cutting to the chase, and allowing for interpolations and extrapolations, i.e. whether to think big, farming ideas and allowing for fierce and free debate, or to think small, on the achievement of individual ‘liberation’ and the purging of ‘defilements’ from the composite makeshift personalities that we call ‘I’…
streaming consciousness... 
Reply