Buddhists Walk, not Run, for Peace, not President…
Good things come to those who wait. Instant gratification is cheap, but unfulfilling. Time is the special sauce that adds flavor. And while it’s not something that the Buddha necessarily talked about, I think it goes well with the general thrust of Buddhism, which is essentially a non-thrust. Western action is heavily reactive, leaving no action unanswered, as I hear Mark Z exhort every day: “Engage, engage, engage,” as if social media were like going blindly into an empty void and people have to be reminded to say something to that best friend that they haven’t seen in years.
Apparently, Mark Z has yet to get the word that people leave Facebook just to get away from the toxic level of aggressive behavior that often passes for engagement. Back to the point of the post: maybe if people weren’t so quick to engage, then maybe everybody would be happier for a few more minutes of each day. Those minutes add up and, if nurtured carefully, can make the difference between a bad life and a good one.
If the monks that Walk for Peace accomplish nothing else, then they get the message out for mindfulness and meditation, that action is more important than reaction, especially when that action is a good one. I doubt that the Buddha ever talked about awareness of breath, but that’s what the monks talk about. That’s not Buddhism; that’s Vipassana meditation, so close enough, I guess. The important thing is that it’s non-reactive. Karma is about actions, not reactions. If you have nothing good to give, then SFTU. Again, the Buddha never said that, but someone did.
hardie karges and 
If there’s anything more annoying, as a Buddhist Studies MA student, than having to memorize lists of lists after lists full of lists from the annals of the ancients, it’s having to plow through the re-definitions of all those terms from the mouths of the moderns (is ‘anals’ a word?). This is not high scholarship. This is the business of busy-work, the intellectual equivalent of keeping that shovel moving to justify your union job, or to keep your position as the arbiter of privilege in the fan-boy chat-pages of Facebook…
Yes, this is a dimension of suffering, more than the sum of your life, more than the breadth of this world, an entire dimension, or two, length width depth time and biology chemistry physics, at the very least, all conspiring to keep you within limits, physical limits, by a margin of maybe 51 to 49, you’re doomed, to a life sentence, paragraph, chapter and verse, complete with death, guaranteed, and there’s not much you can do about that, no matter what some sweet-talking New Age guru with his most articulate drugstore Buddhism tells you…
streaming consciousness... 
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