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  hardie karges 4:08 am on April 7, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: anger ( 6 ), Buddhism ( 353 ), Hardie Karges ( 155 ), Hatred ( 5 ), justice ( 2 ), kileshas ( 2 ), lovingkindness, meditation ( 112 ), self ( 16 ), selfishness ( 4 )   

  Samma Sankappa: Right Thoughts in Service to Buddhism  

  

  Anger is an object lesson, not just about hatred, but lust, craving and mindless passion. It feeds on itself until it destroys something. And that is implicit in the Buddha’s message, that these kileshas, i.e. defilements, feed on themselves. That is why Buddhist love is not the passionate kind, and even lovingkindness better be careful, that the passionate embrace of a babe in swaddling clothes stops well short of puberty, and so finds a larger audience in brotherly and sisterly love, instead of rape, pillage, and incest. 

  Words can do that, calm passions and waylay anger, though it can often create as many problems as it solves. The point is that it’s a tool, and that implies choice, and skill, in the manner of its execution. That is why they are such a double-edged sword, but a steel-edged sword at that, rugged and durable and thorough in its prohibitions. The only question is how to apply those prohibitions with justice and fairness and forethought in its planning. 

  If words can devote themselves, at the insistence of consciousness, to the cessation of anger and hatred, then it will go a long way toward solving the problems of the world. If that mission can be extended to lust, craving, and mindless passions, then it will go a long way toward solving the problems of the self. Because the problem of self is not just an abstract point of doctrinal dispute between Buddhists and Brahmins. It is a problem of selfishness in the lives of men and women. Lose the self and save the world. 
   

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  hardie karges 4:29 am on March 24, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 353 ), Hardie Karges ( 155 ), lovingkindness, meditation ( 112 ), metta ( 19 ), monk ( 2 ), religion ( 128 ), renunciation ( 10 ), spiritual bypassing ( 4 ), spirituality ( 10 ), Thailand ( 70 ), y-chromosome   

  Buddhism in the Bardo: Survival of the Species…  

  

  Some people might laugh at a monk in meditation, wasting his life away, but I laugh at the silly fools who cause global warming. Because, after living a long time in Thailand, that’s the main reason that I was reluctant to get involved with Buddhism, the perception that it was too passive, and incapable of dealing with the issues that face the world. So, for me that was an early premonition of what I might now call something like ‘socio-spiritual bypassing,’ i.e. the avoidance of social obligations by invoking the spiritual primacy of renunciation. 

   But at some point, I realized that renunciation was probably a greater tool than all the political action in the world, and, at least on some ways, likely to produce the greater impact, also. Because, for all our sociopolitical posturing, little is accomplished along those lines, and much of the developed world may soon be crisscrossed with windmills, without any detectable difference in our addiction to rapid locomotion, despite the visible degradation of our relationship to Nature. With a population of more than eight billion souls, renunciation may soon be the only avenue of survival. 

  And, if that’s a bitter pill to swallow, then so be it. Because the writing has been on the wall for at least sixty to eighty years now, and we’ve only sunk deeper in our denial of the likely results, as Elon exhorts us to make more babies, so that he can rake in more gazillions. And that’s maybe the saddest part, that the only way that we can show our love for these people on this planet is to create more babies, who must then shoulder the burden of our conundrum.  

  So suddenly renunciation is not a bad option at all, and the disappearance of the y-chromosome only seconds that emotion. Because, whatever the numbers of our reproduction and its proliferation, or not, it’s impossible to live in a world without love. But we might need to change that meaning. And that’s where Buddhism comes in, because love comes in many forms and flavors. Metta, or lovingkindness, is the preferred Buddhist flavor, and the world community is the intended recipient. That’s Buddhism. 
   
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  hardie karges 4:26 am on February 25, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Abhidharma ( 5 ), Buddhism ( 353 ), compassion ( 7 ), Dalai Lama ( 10 ), ego ( 32 ), karuna ( 6 ), lovingkindness, meditation ( 112 ), metta ( 19 ), nirvana ( 11 ), philosophy ( 78 ), rebirth ( 33 ), religion ( 128 ), self ( 16 ), spirituality ( 10 )   

  Kindness and Compassion are the Heart and Soul of Buddhism  

  

  Compassion has no expiration date. It’s never too late to make new friends with old enemies. This is one of the secrets to a good life: no grudges, no scorched earth, no retribution, and, most importantly, no regrets. It should be simple, since you don’t really have to do anything, but in fact it’s one of the hardest things ever, so attached as we are to our egos and our ‘face’ that we spend so much time and effort saving, lest someone steal it right off of our heads, haha. 

  The Dalai Lama once said that his religion was simple, and that’s kindness, which is compassion, in a word, same thing, same time, and that’s Buddhism, too, in a word. All the elaborate lists and literary expositions that comprise the Buddhist Abhidharma are unnecessary to describe the heart of Buddhism, so why waste so much time and effort when you can put it all in a word, or two? Because yes, there is another word that needs to be included, and if karuna is the first word, then metta is the second, often translated as ‘lovingkindness’ or simple ‘friendliness.’ 

  Put the two words together, and you’ve captured the heart and soul of Buddhism. In fact, modern standard Thai language does indeed often combine the two words for extra effect, so mettakaruna is a word or phrase that you will hear often there. Suffering is famously the back-story to Buddhism, that and its cessation, and that’s pretty much all you need to know. The cosmology of self and rebirth are important but debatable, IMHO, and thus of secondary importance, ditto nirvana. The analogy to Christian forgiveness might be worth mentioning but it isn’t necessary. Be good; don’t be bad. It’s that simple. 

   
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  hardie karges 11:34 am on February 18, 2023 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: awakening, change ( 3 ), craving ( 13 ), desire ( 4 ), enlightenment ( 11 ), Hardie Karges ( 155 ), lovingkindness, metta ( 19 ), Middle Path ( 39 )   

  Buddhism 101: Metta and Karuna, Love and Compassion 

  

  

  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 7:05 am on April 17, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 353 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 146 ), Easter ( 2 ), emotion ( 5 ), Hardie Karges ( 155 ), lovingkindness, meditation ( 112 ), metta ( 19 ), religion ( 128 ), sangha ( 10 )   

  Buddhist Metta in the Age of Social Media… 

  

  

  Metta is simple and one of the cornerstones of Buddhism: friendship, simple friendship. Or call it ‘loving-kindness’ if that reconciles you with the Hebrew chesed of your Judeo-Christian tradition. Just note that it is not the passion that is usually associated with Christian ‘loving-kindness,’ not even the passionate embrace of a mother and her child. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it’s not necessary. What’s necessary is that the child not experience fear and anger and other defilements and afflictions.

  But we Westerners, particularly Americans, are raised on a diet of emotional cocktails, roller-coasters and built-in toasters, speeding up and then putting on brakes, heating up and then cooling our feet, such that life is nothing but one vast mood swing, which we must then ‘shrink’ by repeated visits to the therapist of our choice. To be a ‘bad-ass’ is a compliment in the US of A, and it shows in our interactions with the world. We fight our enemies to the death on battlefields, while never questioning the enemy within.

  This is one reason why it’s so difficult for Americans to be good Buddhists. Because we look for enlightenment in dialogue and debate, rather than the silence that brilliantly illustrates Emptiness, if not strictly define it. Because we look for our meditation in the words of some endless rap from some best-selling app from the online app-store of one of the world’s richest men, rather than that same silence which the Buddha himself used, as do thousands of monks to this day.

  And whether those monks win or lose the debates that some “spiritual bad-asses” (actual quote) find so rewarding and illuminating is not important. What’s important is quieting the mind (i.e. consciousness) by the necessary hours of silent and still sitting that make life itself the only reward necessary for a rewarding existence. All the cars and bars and Hollywood stars on assorted sh*t-stained sidewalks are but illustrations in a magazine that most people can’t sit still long enough to actually read.

  Compared to these challenges, metta is a literal piece of cake, to be shared with friends on any given day, and maybe even twice on Sunday, or Christmas, or Easter. The world is our sangha, our community, and strangers are as much a part of that as family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. In fact, that can be its greatest reward, communion with strangers as if they were lifelong friends. You can’t know that pleasure until you test those waters. The first rule of friendship is to be friendly, simple. Smile. Happy Easter. Happy Buddhist New Year.

   
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  hardie karges 7:00 am on January 23, 2022 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 353 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 146 ), defilement ( 2 ), dharma ( 26 ), kilesha ( 8 ), love ( 48 ), lovingkindness, metta ( 19 ), religion ( 128 )   

  Buddhism and the True Meaning of Love 

  

  

  ‘Falling in Love’ is all about attachment. True love is all about non-attachment. True love looks for soft spots to protect. Aggression looks for soft spots to attack, and attachment isn’t much better, by weakening that spot, even if not physically attacking. By ‘true love,’ of course, I’m talking about Buddhist metta, typically translated as ‘lovingkindness,’ if you’re Jewish or Christian, but that still preserves some passion, and suffering, so maybe better translated more like the Buddha himself probably intended, so something like ‘brotherly love’ or ‘sisterly love,’ as the case may be. To be clear, I think that being in a relationship is fine, sometimes wonderful, but it shouldn’t necessarily be based on the hysterical (no pun) madness of being ‘in love.’

  Score one for arranged marriages? I wouldn’t go that far. Exercising one’s innate free will, to whatever extent it exists, and despite all the limitations placed upon it, is all about what it is to be human. ‘Give me liberty or give me death’? Haha, once again, I probably wouldn’t go that far. Because true freedom is freedom FROM, not freedom TO, freedom from any and all the defilements that plague us, but not freedom to do anything we want, regardless of whom it hurts. And this is an important distinction. Kileshas are the Buddhist name for those defilements that destroy our humanity and reduce us once again to the animal world from which we’ve evolved.

  It’s funny, though, because often these defilements themselves come paired just like the pair-bonding couples that cause many of the problems in their quest for reproduction rights, in addition to other attachments and liens on property. Because jealousy and revenge are twin kileshas, just like hate and anger, one feeding off the other like two heads of a serpent striking, and best avoided. The great Buddhist dilemma, or tetralemma, is how to deal with aggression. Do you turn the other cheek? But no Christian really did that, did they? To live from sensation to sensation is to live like an animal. To follow dharma is to live like a human.

   
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  hardie karges 4:11 am on November 21, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 353 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 146 ), dialectic ( 10 ), Hardie Karges ( 155 ), lovingkindness, mindfulness ( 21 )   

  Buddhism at the Crossroads: First Do no Harm… 

  

  ‘First do no harm’ is part of the Hippocratic Oath. It should also be part of the Buddhist Oath, or fundamental precepts. ‘Primum non nocere’ as later formulated, this is more than just a cute little saying. This is fundamental to Buddhist principles. Because there really is no call to action. If anything, the reality is almost the exact opposite. The cute aphorisms are numerous: ‘A wise man once said nothing.’ ‘Don’t just do something! Sit there!’ You get the idea. Buddhism is first and foremost a religion of renunciation, and that is a fact of history. Nothing can change that. Meditation is the practice of Buddhism, no matter your sect or sex.

  Other things do change, though, and Buddhism is an ongoing dialog and dialectic, which I think is good, for the most part, though, if it doesn’t Christianize Buddhism totally, haha. It goes both ways. There is Christian mindfulness now, also, just as there is Buddhist ‘lovingkindness.’ The world is getting small as populations grow and grow, and soon there will be no place to hide. Buddhism is made for an over-expansive world. It shows how to find peace within, even when there is little peace without. We are a young species and prone to failures. Time will only tell if we will eventually survive and thrive, now by doing less, rather than doing more. The hard stuff was easy. The easy stuff will be hard.

   
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  hardie karges 10:44 am on August 8, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Alexander the Great, Castaneda ( 6 ), chesed ( 2 ), consciousness ( 23 ), dukkha ( 13 ), Greece ( 4 ), Hindi, India ( 11 ), language ( 103 ), lovingkindness, meditation ( 112 ), metta ( 19 ), Myanmar ( 3 ), nirvana ( 11 ), Pali ( 13 ), Sanskrit ( 15 ), shaman, shunya ( 8 ), shunyata ( 20 ), Theravada ( 38 ), Yangon ( 2 ), Yaqui   

  Buddhist Metta-tation, Friendship Beyond Thought, Language Optional… 

  

  

  The truest love is metta, friendship, without all the burdens of possession. That’s Buddhist love, of course, without all the weeping, wailing, and the gnashing of teeth. The Pali word metta often gets written up as ‘lovingkindness’ by latter-day Buddhists, mostly American, who want the passion that term implies, but the Buddha likely intended nothing of the sort. That’s a Christian term, too, from the Hebrew chesed, with a heavy dose of devotion implied, but the Buddha seemed to intend none of that, and the word’s presence in many other Asian languages of the time reflects none of it, either.

  So ‘lovingkindness’ would seem to come from a totally different line of descent by genome. Culture is not genome, though, of course, though they often parallel one another, and the ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition seems to reflect that. So, we Westerners tend to be emotion junkies, even when that emotion is not necessarily a pleasant one. We are implored to embrace suffering, by that logic, even though suffering implies pain, and the heavy dose of sadness that often brings. The fact that the Pali word dukkha means ‘suffering’ and the related word dukhee means ‘sadness’ in modern Hindi would seem to reflect that range of intent.

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  hardie karges 11:18 am on June 6, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 353 ), chesed ( 2 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 146 ), Indus Valley ( 2 ), Kama Sutra, lovingkindness, Malcolm Gladwell, metaphysics ( 4 ), metta ( 19 ), passion ( 9 ), philosophy ( 78 ), religion ( 128 ), suffering ( 21 ), 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 11:07 am on August 23, 2020 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 353 ), dukkha ( 13 ), Hinduism ( 24 ), love ( 48 ), lovingkindness, metta ( 19 ), Pali ( 13 ), Sanskrit ( 15 )   

  Buddhism and Love, True True love… 

  

  True love doesn’t grasp or cling. True love embraces all and claims nothing. But this is a huge subject, of course, and it’s always good to define your terms, if you expect to have any reasonable discussion, because the word lends itself to many different interpretations, not the least of which is the reproduction of the species, without which we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation…

  Birth, after all, is the origin of each and every individual, if not the species, even if the species is the one most at risk. But many people, especially we westerners, see love as something to be IN, i.e. IN LOVE, so something far above and beyond the simple act of reproduction, more like an entire dimension that swallows us up whole, only to hopefully be released on our word at the middle of our sentence with the ensuing prospects of good behavior. Good luck with that…

  Other languages even describe the same feeling as being lost, i.e. lost in love, so that hits the nail squarely on the head, now, doesn’t it? But that’s so Christian, the passion and the cross, even if the passion was originally suffering, and the cross is really a sword…

  But Buddhism has none of that, AFAIK, but plenty of friendship and brotherly love, and for sisters, too, forever enshrined in the concepts and words of ‘metta’ and ‘maitri’, in Pali and Sanskrit, respectively and respectfully, often translated as ‘lovingkindness’ for people of Euro extraction, even though that’s originally a translation of the Hebrew ‘(c)heced’, aka ‘covenant loyalty’, apparently, so same deal, once the Romans got romance, and put woman on a pedestal from which they could no longer work, only f*ck, then everyone else had to follow those patriarchs of fashion, even if ‘(c)heced’ originally and literally meant to bow oneself, namaste…

  But that’s all water under the bridge, because that was then and this is now, but Buddhism is still a way of life full of dispassion, literally, i.e. relief from suffering, or at least compassion, i.e. misery loves company. But Buddhist suffering, dukkha, does not have to be painful, not at all. It is simply an acknowledgement that you are going to die, and that you are not the center of the universe…

  Now I won’t say that the Hindus-for-hire who tell you that you are the center of the universe are lying, but simply that they are misinformed, as any scientist can attest. For, in the Buddha’s eyes, we are simply a heap of aggregates, so let’s say adjectives, not nouns, and certainly not eternal ones passing from life to life, notwithstanding the paradox of rebirth…

  But at least for this life in this world, we all have each other, and that is not so bad, once you stop and think about it, and once you broaden your circle of friends to include those with whom you may find more degrees of separation than you can account for in the memories of those who conveniently surround you. Racism sucks. Does the Universe care what you do with your life? We are the Universe. We care…

  hardie karges and tiramit are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    tiramit 9:06 pm on August 28, 2020 Permalink | Reply

    “…we are simply a heap of aggregates …adjectives, not nouns,” I like it! It explains something about the Khandas that always puzzled me. Thanks

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    hardie karges 9:12 pm on August 28, 2020 Permalink | Reply

    Yes, it was a revelation to me at the time, also, though I’ve heard someone since describe them as verbs, but no, I still think that they are adjectives. This opens a whole new field of inquiry, though, into the linguistic nature of our self-perception. Thanks for your comments…