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  • hardie karges 11:34 am on February 18, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: awakening, , , desire, , , , ,   

    Buddhism 101: Metta and Karuna, Love and Compassion 

    Buddhism in Bhutan

    When your burdens become blessings and your hatred becomes love, then you are truly enlightened. And ‘enlightened’ may be a loaded term, filled with false promises and moronic miscalculations, but still it is frequently found. So, I use it, as do many others. Is the Buddha’s ‘awakening’ really any more accurate than to refer to his ‘enlightenment?’ I suppose that ‘awakening’ sounds self-motivated, while ‘enlightenment’ sounds as if a light is being switched on somewhere, but that might only be a difference more apparent than actual…

    But the point is to make some adjustments to your current internal conditions, rather than insisting on changing something else, or someone else, to suit your requirements, which are likely nothing of the sort, but instead desires and cravings and itches wanting scratching, for lack of a better metaphor. And as always, I take the middle position, or path if you prefer, that sweet spot between naked aggression, on the one hand, and passive submission, on the other, such that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the apparent compromise is in fact a fresh and superior synthesis. We should be open to change, not scared of it.

    But love is not as tricky as it seems, requiring flowers in February, ribbons and bows in December, and God help you if you forget the anniversary, not to be confused with the birthday in another Indo-European language. It’s confusing. But Buddhist love is not. ‘Lovingkindness’ is a Hebrew loanword via Christianity, but metta simply means brotherhood, or sisterhood, as the case may be, universal in its scope and nature, with passion distinctly optional. After all, passion originally meant suffering, and that is the starting point for Buddhism, but not the final word, which is always metta. Most important is to forego all hate…

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  • hardie karges 5:39 am on March 20, 2022 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , demmocracy, desire, , 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.

     

  • hardie karges 12:08 pm on March 8, 2020 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , deliverance, desire, , primum non nocere   

    Buddhism and the Freedom to do Nothing… 

    Freedom FROM is as much or more important than freedom TO, and this illustrates much of the historic difference between east and west, Buddhism and Christianity, that we Westerners typically want to DO this and DO that, as if all these actions hold supreme importance, as if the world has somehow advanced a step forward if one of the flying Wallenda brothers walks the tightrope over the Grand Canyon or not, as if the spectacles of our life are more important than our fundamental dignity, as if a more important goal is to put the ‘fun’ back in that ‘fundamental’ freedom. But this is a perversion of the concept, IMHO, because a more important freedom is the freedom from the fetters that constrain us, freedom from the ties that bind too tightly, regardless of whether we push that freedom to its final conclusion, regardless of whether we tempt fate simply for the sake of the deliverance we so desire. Because deliverance is easier than all that, it being a simple freedom FROM something, whatever it is that you so fear. Desire need not be brought into this simple equation, when the only result we seek is a simple zero which signifies balance. So why do we need to risk death to prove that we are free, when it is death that we want deliverance from in the first place? Obviously, we don’t. But boredom is the price of freedom, in that once we are free, that we don’t always know what to do with it, because for me to thrust my freedom in your face is to assert the primacy of my freedom to DO something over your freedom to be free FROM something, i.e. me, in this case. But we Americans love to ‘get in people’s faces’, ‘push your buttons’, ‘stand our ground’, even if it means that we reserve the right to follow you around doing just that (and these are all actual quotes, not mere suppositions). And this is something that Buddhism understands well, and makes it negative, in a technical sense, in that you really don’t have to do anything to be a good Buddhist, because more important is what you don’t do, which is to harm anyone else, or any sentient being, for that matter, so not dissimilar from the classic maxim of bio-ethical non-maleficence ‘primum non nocere’, i.e. first do no harm. And the principle carries over easily into social ethics: you don’t have to do anything, as long as you do nothing bad. So ‘not bad’ becomes the definition of ‘good’, and ‘unfettered’ becomes the definition of ‘freedom’. And if this seems like a passive lifestyle, then so be it. You can test your limits as time permits, as long as it does not impinge on the limits of others. After all, the future is distinctly uncertain, and so risky, while the past is certain, but scarcely known. So how can we know where we’re going, if we don’t even know where we’ve been?

     

  • hardie karges 6:53 am on June 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: desire, progress,   

    DESIRE-A-DAY 

    Welcome to the poem-a-day club. I’d like to think it’s ‘automatic writing’, but no, it’s work. Automatic writing was all the rage for a while with the Dadaists and surrealists and psychics and psychoanalysts looking for shortcuts to the ‘inner self’, as if what’s there might simply be downloaded on to paper. That was a golden age for art and literature and even science, too, the years 1900-30, the age of relativity, quantum, cubism, surrealism, pragmatism, positivism, and more, literally an age of knowledge that we have yet to supersede, despite all our technology. Those were the good old days of silly-eyed optimism and belief in endless progress. Now that we’re swimming in the fruits of that progress, we don’t know what to do with it. We’ll probably end up blowing it, arguing about who gets the biggest piece of the pie, without appreciating the fact that the pie didn’t even exist a century ago. I lived in a house during my childhood that wouldn’t even be considered ‘livable’ by middle class standards in the US now, regardless of the fact that my father died in a house very similar, by choice. Desires are somehow very adept at keeping up with the Joneses.

     

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