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  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 5:28 am on May 12, 2024 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism in the Back Room: Doing Laundry to do Laundry… 

    Beware a path too easy, because it may be a false one. Maybe that goes without saying, but probably not, because most people assume that if they ever find an acceptable path in life, then hopefully it should at least be easy. And I get it, me too, but good luck finding that in real life, because real life is nothing if not a challenge. And Buddhism is no different. In fact, ease and benefit may be inversely proportional, i.e. the easier it is, the less benefit you’ll derive from it. Which almost seems too obvious, that you get what you work for, but sometimes it’s necessary to spell things out. 

    This goes to karma, of course, actions, and comes back around as a sort of fate, prescribed actions based on prior performance, anything but predetermined, even when that is what some people want in their religion above all else. Many people can see no reason to believe in a religion when it offers them nothing but freedom of choice. People want magic. Except when they want certainty. Don’t worry. When they know, you’ll know, and life will be nothing if not exciting in the process. 

    And isn’t that what most people want more than anything—excitement? Unfortunately, that is the case all too often. People are more desirous of drama than dharma, and who cares if the kids must figure out what’s right and wrong in their own free time and at their own limited initiative. But Buddhism is better than that. The Buddhist Five precepts are almost identical to the Christian’s second set of Five Commandments, everything except the alcohol. The first set of five are fundamentally Islamic. Then Buddhism only gets better: Emptiness, Consciousness, Kindness, and Goodness, the Four Nesses’ even nobler truth, IMHO. You heard it here first.  

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 3:09 am on April 28, 2024 Permalink | Reply
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    Non-Violence: the Original and Noblest Truth of Buddhism…   

    ‘First do no harm,’ primum non nocere in Latin, is part of the Hippocratic Oath. It should also be part of the Buddhist Oath. Because nothing is more important, not really, than ahimsa, non-violence, even if it’s not part of the Four Noble Truths or even the Eightfold path, though it could easily be assumed in samma kammanta, samyak karmanta, i.e. right actions, so obvious is the connection. And that karmanta, of course, could also be translated as ‘good karma,’ so think of it that way if you prefer, since most people don’t know that the word karma literally means ‘actions,’ so make a note. 

    Yes, sometimes the simplest and most obvious things are the most important, whether they are ever written up that way or not. Because when the Dalai Lama says that his religion is kindness, that’s exactly what he means, non-violence, for starters, on a sliding scale ranging from sympathy to empathy. And if that sympathy gets you some basic non-violence, then high-style empathy should eventually get you some beginner-level enlightenment, at the least.  

    And from there you can dream of nirvana, if you’re ambitious, or just content yourself with a nice job and a nice family in a nice little town with an active city center and a price line that won’t break your budget. Because the details don’t really matter so much, once you’ve made your peace with the world. You can adapt it to your requirements or adapt yourself to its requirements, or you can Buddha-like split the difference and walk that meandering Middle Path in a sweet spot dialectical dance and reconciliation of opposites. I think you already know my choice. 

     
    • quantumpreceptor's avatar

      quantumpreceptor 3:40 am on May 1, 2024 Permalink | Reply

      I really like the picture one of your last lines left in my mind. “ in a sweet spot dialectical dance and reconciliation of opposites”
      I sometimes see more of a knife edge but I would rather dance and have fun.

      My take on no harm is found here:

      The Paramita of Meaningful Bahavior

      • hardie karges's avatar

        hardie karges 3:25 am on June 23, 2024 Permalink | Reply

        Nice. Thanks…

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 3:10 am on January 6, 2024 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism 102: Kindness is Contagious  

    Disease is not the only thing that is contagious. So is kindness, and compassion, and the smile of a stranger. That is how karma works. What goes around comes around. And if that sounds all New-Agey and superstitious, I suspect that it could be proven, if we only knew how to properly frame the questions, to probe the parameters of truth, in an open field without any markers nor metrics. After all, just how do you measure kindness and compassion, anyway? I mean: you can’t just walk into the supermarket and order a quart or a liter or it, now, can you? I wish, haha… 

    But what you can do is ‘pay it forward’, i.e. not just return every kindness with a kindness as an equal and equitable ‘payback’, but initiate such actions without any promise of a return on that investment. Because, if you’re expecting a return, then it’s not an act of kindness at all, but an act of business, interest on principal, compounded annually, if not quarterly. But true kindness is entirely selfless, by its very nature, and so avoids the back-slapping and hand-clapping which is the minimum that most people expect as reward for their generosity. 

    Why have most nations adopted some form of religion at some point in their history, anyway? To enlarge the circle of friends, of course, and hopefully improve people’s lives in the process. Because, without it, the only people you can trust are your immediate family, and beyond that, maybe even your so-called ‘race’. Religion is a way to transcend racism, and what is religion if not a circle of kindness? The challenge is to include everyone in that circle. Because then karma is not only a likely story, but a living breathing reality… and the meek will inherit the earth.  

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 6:51 am on November 12, 2023 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism in the Real World: To Be or Not To Be… 

    When you believe in yourself, don’t believe too much, just enough to accomplish what you need, not enough to inflate your ego. But this is a hard thing to measure, so must simply somehow be ‘felt,’ as if it were a real substantial thing. It’s not. This is the problem which often occurs when all the ‘other’ religions, philosophies, theoretical sciences, and sundry spiritualities like Hinduism, Buddhism, quantum physics, and chaos theory all get lumped together as co-equal partners in ‘New Age’ metaphysics. 

    The problem, of course, is that many are mutually contradictory. Many things simply can’t be had both ways, Buddhism and Hinduism being the best examples. Hindus believe in an eternal soul. Buddhists don’t. Still Hindus consider Buddhists a renegade sect and constantly try to surround them and close the circle (zero?) while no one is looking. Karma, rebirth and past lives are the best-laid trap, to which Buddhism must constantly be on guard not to fully submit, lest it become ‘just another Hindu sect.’ 

    And so it is with you. Self is not a binary choice, all or none, duality or non-duality. You can be a personality with a happy and fruitful time in this life and this world without ever being left with the dubious choice of a cosmic eternal all-important soul or a subject-less object-less witness to actions that you have no right to. Our sentences have subjects and objects, whether English, Spanish, or Hindi, and so do you, if you want them. You are only an unwilling participant, simple mindless witness, if you so choose. You can be as active as you want, and you can tell Robert Adams that I said so. 

     
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    hardie karges 4:17 am on October 1, 2023 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism in the Balance: Karma Chases Dogma 

    Karma is not just simple cause and effect. That’s Newton’s Third Law of Motion. With karma the effect is not reciprocal; it’s indirect. If you hit someone and they hit you back, that’s not karma. That’s a fistfight. And if it involves money, then that’s business, haha. So, no, it’s not so simple as it seems on the surface, and not so simple as it’s often defined: cause-and-effect. But that doesn’t mean that it’s as complicated as some people, especially monkish scholars, would like to make it, either, with ‘multiple feedback loops’ often extending over generations. Since this life in this world is all we really know, then everything else is wild speculation. 

    But karma, rebirth, and past lives have largely taken over a once-simple Buddhist discipline of meditation, moderation, and self-control, that apparently needed more magic to sell it upstream to the late-comers and Tibetans. So Buddhist temples in Nepal often share space with their Hindu counterparts, and the official line of Hinduism vis a vis Buddhism is that the latter is merely one of the many branch offshoots of the former, which is not an unreasonable position to take, especially considering the vastly different Vajrayana tradition, which was state-of-the-art Buddhism in the 8th century CE.  

    That is when it became the official religion of Tibet, and entered its last days of importance in India, before the Mughals finally gave it the coup de grace a few centuries later. That’s also one of the most popular forms of Buddhism in the West, also, along with Zen, though the original meditation-based Theravada is finally making some much-deserved headway, after being reinvented as ‘Vipassana.’ That’s my brand, closest to the original, preferably without all the past lives and subsequent debates about rebirth. 

    But I still make some room for karma, albeit ‘karma lite,’ i.e. this life only, with effects largely subjective and internal to the actor and perceiver. So, in this view, if you do bad things, nothing will hit you over the head, not immediately, but you will set in motion a chain of events that will make your life increasingly more miserable in direct proportion to the misery which you have caused to others. If that sounds like only a toothier version of the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” that’s because, well, it is. The karmic version only calls direct attention to the fact there WILL be consequences. But you will have to be the judge of that, though I can attest to it.  

     
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    hardie karges 3:01 pm on May 6, 2023 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism, Karma, and the Vicissitudes of Fate…  

    Karma is not fate. Karma is action. But the term is often used similarly, even by those who should know better, and so we are left to deal with it as such. So, when someone says, “that’s your karma,” then what they really mean is that you must have done some really bad things, in this life or a previous one, and now the law of karmic justice is giving you a taste of your own medicine. So, you must suffer some consequences, for your current circumstances otherwise would be unexplainable. And to a limited extent I agree with that assessment, but only to that limited extent.  

    But that’s not fate, which is blind, by definition, and which is variously described as ‘beyond control, ‘governed by supernatural powers’, and/or ‘destiny’ depending on whether the word is used a verb or a noun. But karma implies feedback, to something which occurred previously, and to which many would ascribe ‘multiple feedback loops,’ including, but not limited to, previous lives, the contents of which can only be imagined, or at best surmised by reference to what is now occurring, the two often assumed to have similar, if not the exact same, causal connections. 

    And this is where it often leaves me standing there scratching my head, still wondering how any or all of this could ever be proven. Hint: it can’t, none of it. It’s an attempt to ascribe justice to that which would otherwise have no recourse to justice, the courts too busy with their own peccadilloes and busy work schedules to worry about previous lives, which are at best wild speculation, and at worst total BS. So, I limit my karma to this life and this world, since I surely know that, if I know anything. Another take on the subject would be to assume that it’s all an elaborate hoax to assure that the highest castes and classes of society continue in their dominance of the lower ones, but I’ll leave that speculation to another write…  

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 7:15 am on March 3, 2023 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhist Karma and the Middle Path to Salvation   

    You want good karma? Help a beggar to eat. That’s good karma. Because karma literally means ‘acts’ or ‘actions’, though it is often used almost synonymously with the English word ‘fate,’ as though it were all about some sort of predestination. But no, that’s a derivative meaning which may or may not always apply. The most important thing is right actions, or samma kammanta, as specified in the Eightfold Path that concludes the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. 

    And that’s the important thing, to perform good acts, the other steps along the path, not unlike the Ten Commandments of Christianity, including right speech, right livelihood, and, of course, the basics: do not kill, do not steal, and for god’s sake don’t mess with your neighbor’s partner! Is nothing sacred? And if the Christians like to phrase that as ‘thou shalt not covet,’ then the Sanskrit is not so much different. They’re related languages and people, after all, and the Buddha puts ‘craving’ up there as the main cause of suffering. 

    But where East and West might truly differ, though, is in the speed and willingness to act. Because if we in the West see our active ‘go go go’ lifestyles as a normal and predictable outcome of our sojourn upon this planet, I can assure you that not everyone sees life and the world that way, least of all the rishis for which India is so famous, not to mention the pandits, gurus, swamis, and acharyas. And so, there’s a hidden message for them here also: Do something! After all, you can’t sit in a cave all your life, can you? Can you? 

     
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    hardie karges 9:53 am on December 11, 2022 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhist News Flash! Dogma Gets Run Over by Karma 

    Beat all dogma with the dullest of dull clubs and bury it six point six feet (two meters) under the ground, because Buddhism is better than that. Still the temptations are real, to establish a Buddhism comma INC that can generate ample funds for wayward monks and maybe send a kid or two to school in the process, or at least I hope so. Karma means actions, after all, and that’s almost always better than dogma.

    But the quest for certainty exists, as in all religions, that being their sine qua non, for lack of a better foreign expression to impress you with, haha. Because the only thing certain is the past, and we are its prisoner, if we let it rule us. So, its only use to us is as a guide, or a teacher, and isn’t that why we always chose someone older than us as our teachers? Their past is their certainty and the tool of their trade. But life must be lived, and not merely studied, like so many beans to be counted, while they find a path through us.

    And that’s why we focus on the present, with only an eye to the past, since what was right for that time has a reduced relevance and resonance for the present. Otherwise, we are committed to dogma and the predilections of the past, while the future is a new babe a-borning, and soon must be swaddled and fed. But these are only metaphors, of course, and if time really exists, then it probably has the same number of dimensions as space, namely one, so just here and now. Only one dimension is necessary to define a point, and that’s the point.

     
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    hardie karges 6:47 am on October 9, 2022 Permalink | Reply
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    The Poisons of Buddhism: Hate and Anger and the Path to Danger… 

    Anger destroys everything and everyone in its path, and usually a few bystanders, also. Thus, it is rightly one of the three poisons of Buddhism, as a synonym of hatred, dvesha, and co-equal to lust, raga, and delusion, moha. These poisons are also known variously as the Unwholesome Roots (good name for a Rock-and-Roll band, haha), and the Three Fires. In other words: don’t be like that. Do good things, and good things will come to you. That’s karma, in this life and this world, no need for all the generation-jumping and multiple feedback loops. Obey your Mom and Dad, and love your neighbor as yourself, also, BTW.

    But anger and hatred hold a special place in my Hall of Fame of disgusting behavior, simply because it’s so unnecessary and so easy to avoid. You don’t have to do anything! But there are a few things that you should definitely NOT do: lose your temper, raise your voice, or say and do things that you know you will later regret. But for some reason it feels so good in the heat of the moment to tell someone and his mother where to go and where to stuff it when they get there, that you just can’t help yourself, and the recriminations and guilt will only come later, like maybe five minutes later.

    Because guilt is the weapon of Karma’s choice, the punishment that should be equal to any crime, but it works only if the guilty party has been taught ethics and morality, and lives in a society where such high purposes have value. Some people are so corrupt that they are impervious to the recrimination of guilty feelings, and so the only punishment for wrongdoing is more wrongdoing, as society degenerates into madness and solutions are hard to find. Sound familiar? Such are sanctions in the city. Maybe it’s time to return to Nature. That’s the original dharma, ธรรมชาติ…

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 8:09 am on February 20, 2022 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , karma, 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 …)
     

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