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    hardie karges 2:31 am on September 28, 2025 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism 102: Cooling the fires of Kilesha… 

    When everything is burning, cool the fires inside with the water of empathy and the chemistry of compassion. There are always at least two different ways to kill a wildfire, of course, as every firefighter knows. You can kill it with water, or you can kill it with fire itself. But which method causes more damage? That’s why water is always preferable, when possible. Because to kill a fire with a rival fire is to destroy everything in the path, ‘scorched earth’, so to speak. It ain’t pretty.

    But drenched earth can be quite pretty, especially after a nasty fire. And if those fires are inside, such as with hatred, greed, and anger, then the improved results are notable. Two foes can fight to the death, of course, but neither one could truly be considered a winner in that case. So, peaceful solutions are always preferable. Both parties will live to play another day, and with all faculties intact, both might even succeed.

    But that is the hardest thing to accomplish, of course, what with alpha males hogging the harem and acting like DNA whose only goal is to climb the ladder of succession to another day and another successful matchup in the breeding room and the board room, where the winner takes all and the losers take nothing. That’s the world of Nature, sometimes cruel and forbidding. But we can do better than that. Because we have the world of consciousness and mind, hopefully even some measure of mindfulness. Be kind.

     
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    hardie karges 2:36 am on September 21, 2025 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism: Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Happiness 

    Live simply to simply live, because everything else is excess. That doesn’t mean that you should limit yourself necessarily, only that you be aware of the repercussions of your decisions. There is a price to pay when your cup ‘runneth over’, too. Nothing is free. If that sounds a lot like karma, that’s because it is, though we’re usually fed karma in its spring-loaded reactionary form, i.e. the effects of karma, actions, more than the actions themselves. It’s a matter of most Buddhist faiths that good actions yield good benefits and bad action the opposite. On that I think that we can all agree.

    But if that sounds natural, please be aware that Nature is not always right and good. For one thing, Nature can be extremely violent, while consciousness can be more easily pacified. This is exactly the realization of Buddhism, also. So, while we hold Nature up as a shining beacon of what can be accomplished, we also recognize that it is not the be-all and end-all. Consciousness is–almost. We should be so lucky that we could simply copy Nature and always come out ahead.

    Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy, but there are always rewards for good hard honest work. Fortunately, doing nothing is also a sacred privilege in this life in this world, so no one can take that away from you. Some of the finest things in this life would qualify as nothing in many people’s vocabulary. Be aware of every thought, sensation, and feeling that passes through consciousness, accepting all as valid, though none as truth, and that will be plenty for today or any day. Such is meditation.

     
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    hardie karges 2:39 am on May 25, 2025 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism 599: Change (Impermanence) is Not so Bad, After All… 

    Nature is the greatest and wisest teacher, unfailing in her knowledge and unerring in her accuracy. In Thai the word for Nature is dharmajati, pronounced something like thammashart, so literally the ‘law of life’, unless you have a better definition of dharma¸ then feel free to use it. The point is, that for all its diversity and beauty and apparent randomness, Nature (with capital N now; see what I did there?) is not only a law, but it’s permanent. This is something that the Buddha warned against constantly, the impermanence of existence, so not something to take lightly.

    That’s because the laws of men are temporary and changing, but the laws of nature are immortal. Now, I probably wouldn’t go as far as the Buddha himself in claiming that change is a cause of suffering, maybe second only to craving and clinging, but still, permanence is a wonder to behold. And if change is only painful when you refuse to accept it, then it can be something truly special when you initiate it yourself. I’m not sure if the Buddha ever experienced that, but I think that it holds true, and I swear by it myself.

    So, if there’s any one thing that I would improve on with Buddhism, it would be the negative connotation of change (and the status of women). Change can be something good, if it follows the Eightfold Path, and so something to seek, not necessarily something to avoid. In the ancient world, I can certainly understand how that could have been an issue, but in our modern world, I think that the greater sin is to avoid change altogether. As always the trick is to follow the Eightfold Middle Path and pursue Right Change, not the bad stuff. Avoid that.

     
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    hardie karges 4:59 am on April 21, 2024 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism 202: Nature is the Law of Life  

    Nature is a law, not a mountain. Rivers and oceans have no more independent existence than you or I. But this is a bone of contention among religions, now, isn’t it, and possibly the main point of division between competing philosophies? Because, if an eternal soul divides Hinduism from Buddhism in India, then the same issue is what divides almost all Western religions from their secular counterparts. After all, isn’t that why most Asians become Christians? Eternal life is Christianity’s main selling point internationally.

    But Nature tends to get a pass from such easy distinctions. Mountains are sacred and rivers aren’t bad. Beaches draw the riffraff, but sublime locations can still be had, if one cares to take a walk and distance oneself from the madding and maddening crowds. And isn’t that what makes a place spiritual, anyway, the silence and the solitude and the serenity implicit in such sublime locations? Bring in the tourist hordes, and the nicest places can quickly go downhill fast, training wheels optional. 

    But that’s neither here nor there from the standpoint of the law that is dharma. The only important thing from the standpoint of dharma is the fact that these phenomena occur in regular and predictable ways, subject to certain causes and conditions. Thus, nature is not random, not entirely, anyway, and not within the time scales utilized by human perception. The implicit beauty is just eye candy for hungry hearts. More important are the principles that govern such relationships. In Thai nature is ธรรมชาติ, dhammashart, the law of life… 

     
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    hardie karges 1:58 pm on November 5, 2022 Permalink | Reply
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    Dharma and the Middle Path as a Law of Nature… 

    There’s always a middle Path, whether or not it’s THE middle Path. This may be a bit of a deviation from the standard central dogma, which likes to break the Middle Path down into the Eightfold Path of Right View, Thought, Speech, Action, Livelihood, Effort, Mindfulness, and Meditation, BUT: who needs dogma, anyway? I don’t. So, I like to think of the Middle Path as a universal principle applicable to a multiplicity of situations, and carrying a message embedded that is worth more than just a little attention.

    Because we are not only just junkies for excess, whether it be luxury or lack, existence or non-existence, or form and emptiness, all aspects of the Buddhist definition, but there seems to be excess embedded into our very value system. For example, when we eat cooked food (yum yum) it’s generally considered best at anything but room temperature, right? We go to great lengths to make our best dishes either steaming hot or icy cold, don’t we? Anything tepid is considered middling, and that’s generally not a good judgment upon a cook’s ability.

    But, why is that? Is there anything intrinsic to taste to be found in that manifestation of attractions to extremes? There’s a possible argument to be made that either extreme is conducive to the preservation of the food, whether at extremely high temperatures or extremely low ones, but that argument quickly falls apart when considering anything besides culinary items. Why do we like bright colors? Why do we like high places? Why do we like deep caves? Perhaps, more to the point: Why do we like getting drunk? Why do we like getting high?

    The most obvious manifestation of these extremes is their danger, but then, on second thought, is it maybe their unnaturalness (is that a word?)? Bingo. Most of us really don’t want to die, now, do we? But we don’t mind pushing the envelope, so to speak, and we certainly don’t mind the thrill aspect. Why? Because it’s not natural, that’s why. And maybe that’s a hidden message of the Buddha: be natural. One definition of dharma, in fact, is just that: the law of Nature. So, does that mean that the Buddha was a Boomer? Cool, that’s okay by me…

     
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    hardie karges 9:54 am on June 20, 2021 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Bill Gates, , , , , nature, , ,   

    Karma is not a B*tch; She is Mother Nature… 

    I made the coffee too strong, and got too excited, so I spilled it accidentally, and now everything’s fine–Life 492…

    That is a simple enough little ditty, now, isn’t it? On one level it’s just a description of another manic Monday living in the USA, down in jungle land, for what it’s worth. And on another level it’s a brief glimpse into the horrors of the caffeine addiction to which I’ve relapsed after successfully divorcing myself from that horrible fate—or so I thought. And on an even different level it’s a description of life itself, as the joking attribution suggests.

    But on a higher level it also says something about Karma, not the Karma of retribution that speaks to the need of some religions for punishment, if not by some God, then by some force, or doctrine. For isn’t monotheism really the replacement of deities by doctrine, so more than the reduction in godheads, really more of an increase in letterheads? And it’s not a Karma of simple cause and effect, which is really more like a business transaction than a connection with a higher force.

    (More …)
     
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    hardie karges 1:14 pm on March 7, 2021 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , Dyaus Pitra, , Mata, mise-en-scene, mutation, nature, Prithvi, , ,   

    Buddha in the Raw: Nature is the Dharma of Birth… 

    People come and go. Events come and go. But dharma is always there, hand in hand with Nature. In fact, in at least a couple or three SE Asian languages, the word for ‘Nature’ itself translates from the original Pali/Sanskrit as ‘Dharma of Birth,’ jati in its original meaning as ‘birth’ long before it came to supplant varna as the most common word for Indian caste, in a more polite form connected to job description, apparently, as if birth were all about some inherited profession, and not the deep ancestry, mostly defined in the popular imagination by color, varna, long before we could count mutations on the y-DNA sex chromosome, and ultimately define the haplogroup in stages, simply by its imperfections in transmission, just like all attempts at eternal life. Breathe deeply.

    And thank God for that Y-chromosome, so that we can reproduce sexually, rather than by other lesser means and mixtures. But the dharma is intrinsically involved, and that is the point, whether in molecular makeup or some concept far removed, in language, DNA’s lofty handmaiden, jealous of DNA, even long before its discovery, and desirous of co-opting that proclivity into the various nominal grunts and syllabic sonic glides that connect hard consonants verbally into molecular syllables capable of standing alone but always looking for partners to run with, creating words and sentences and paragraphs and histories, all under the auspices of simple reproduction, conceptually rather than biologically, and capable of moving through space without stepping incrementally into the medium of space, but rather capable of quantum leapfrogging through the intervening leagues in an instant or less, with or without the materialistic crutches of light and sound.

    We are imperfect creatures of the void and the stuff, any dualism merely implied but not intended, since the 1 and the 0 of stuff and void are ultimately reconcilable into a common source whether conceptual or mathematical, and who’s to know the difference anyway? Dualism and non-dualism are but snapshots in time, incapable of independent existence, and often confused for far greater achievements than they really aspire to. For insertion of the thing into the void is merely the mise-en-scene for a movie into which we were born and from which we will die, scarcely even pretending to know the reasons why or wherefore, simply that it is thus and will be recorded as such by any witness capable of the feat. There are more important things to do and accomplish in the short time allotted to any given system of biological life, and that is the task to which we are beholden as children of the Sun and Moon, in their earthly representations, Dyaus Pitra and Prithvi Mata, Sky Father and Earth Mother, reproducing throughout an uncertain infinity. It is thus. Let old mourning become new mornings, and rebirth can occur in spirit, not flesh…

     
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    hardie karges 11:02 am on August 16, 2020 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism and the Art of the Path… 

    When the world outside imposes limits, then you explore inside, Inner Space, where there are few if any limits. This is the hardest thing for many of us to accept, especially us freedom-junkie Westerners, descendant of Europe and the Indo-European cowboy steppes, some of whom went east and got all meditative, the rest of us long having dallied with the West, and got bored with life on the installment plan, limited to incremental growth and low interest on investment, so we invented capitalism for life in the fast lane, and a convenient alternative to outright combat, while accomplishing largely the same thing, stratification of the races into winners and losers, so as to facilitate social immobility and survival of the fattest…

    So here we are now, some five thousand years later, addicted to our sensations and victims of our adrenaline, having largely conquered the world of Nature and with nowhere else to go but an Outer Space from which there is no return, or an Ocean Deep, where there is no sleep, and the cost of living is high…

    So we return to the predilections of our eastern Indo-Euro cousins, the same ones that we once accused of being the lazy soma-bibbing bumpkins of the clan, but now maybe not so slow or dim-witted after all, they having followed a different path, but of consciousness, not high-rise sky-scraping construction, but a less Nature-defiling path of Inner Space, which, when compared to the alternative of Outer Space, is somehow infinite, if not eternal, so unlimited in Space, if not Time, but on an inner path, not outer, and so protected by the sheaths and membranes of consciousness, not the temporary bulwarks of concrete and steel against bacteria and other forms of DNA that know how to survive against all odds…

    Because Nature will always find a way to survive, if not thrive, because that is what DNA does, once it has been coded, and sent to the factory for reproduction. Thus the path of Nature is a struggle between the twin forces of reproduction and consciousness, existence and non-existence, and the result can only be fruitful, if followed to the letter, and the number, because numbers are crucial to any plan for life, too much and it’s fire, too little and it’s ice, so that path in the middle not only looks nice, but actually is crucial to survival, with only the minimum amount of suffering necessary…

    And that is especially true in Inner Space, the path of least resistance and greatest fruition, whether simple meditative presence or a vast creative innovative Virtual Reality future. The past is certain and unreturnable. The future is a sea of possibilities. The present is a refuge, and a comfortable path between extremes. Suffering is a feeling. Limits are the reality. The only thing without limits is Emptiness…

     
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    hardie karges 11:18 am on August 2, 2020 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism and Nature: the Law of Birth… 

    Nature is ธรรมชาติ, ‘dhammachaht,’ dharma jati, the dharma of birth, not the law of rebirth, in at least a few Asian languages, and likely a few more. And that is probably as good a definition of it as I could come up with, notwithstanding the fact that such a ‘birth’ does indeed become for many a ’round’ of which there are many, and which can neither be proven or disproven, ultimately, but for which there is no intrinsic logic, nor empirical evidence…

    But when we Westerners think of Nature, what do we think of, if not something wild and free, and so a tight fit into our narrative of liberty, and the delightful disobedience which that implies, for we love nothing so much as breaking the rules, ALL the rules, if not all the time, then at least as often as we can get away with it…

    But does Nature do that? Not hardly, I don’t think, and the typical Asian view, by invoking ‘dharma,’ is certainly likening it to a law, and therefore something which we disobey only at great risk to ourselves. But that doesn’t mean that Nature is something written in stone, or on crinkled crackling paper, and the ink stains that have dried upon some lines…

    No, nature is something changing, even if the laws invoked may indeed be unchanging—or not. Thus the first rule of DNA—sh*t happens, i.e. mutations occur, and that becomes the raw material for evolution. Now the central dogma of the science of genetics is that these mutations are random, which may or may not be true, but there is much anecdotal evidence that there may indeed be more to it than that, but for which firm and verifiable evidence is heretofore lacking…

    And that doesn’t even consider the fact of so-called ‘genetic drift,’ which no one can or will deny, but only damn by the faint praise of its ‘driftiness,’ thus removing it from any consideration as something maybe far more serious in terms of cause and/or effect…

    All of which is to say that the role of consciousness in evolution cannot be ruled out, even if some commentaries may have jumped the gun in ascribing to it more than its genuine worth, i.e. “consciousness affects evolution; evolution affects consciousness…”

    But this does nothing to minimize the miracle of birth, regardless, which is certainly not random, even if the product of the most random and brutal orgy, which is fortunately not usually the case, even if the Latin-inspired ‘romance’ may indeed often be lacking on cold dark nights in tight cramped corners….

    But Buddhism is more concerned with the suffering implicit, and it is certainly a fact that death is implied in the ‘law of birth’ and that is the proof of the prevalence of suffering, if only by a 51-49% advantage in the scores and statistics. For the world may be defined by its limits and its suffering, but there is much beauty, also, in Nature and Art, and the consciousness of it…

     
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    hardie karges 12:13 pm on July 5, 2020 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , nature, , vegetarian,   

    Nature Asserts Herself with a Vengeance, and a Virus… 

    Nature is not ours to conquer. Nature is there for us to respect, honor, and obey. And if this seems like common sense, derived from common knowledge, believe me that it is one of the hardest commandments to obey, maybe because it was never written down, or maybe because it is somehow counter-intuitive, that what looks like ‘Nature’s bounty’ to us is somehow limited and precious and subject to restrictions on access.

    And isn’t that the way we males perceive our access to the feminine side of life? Because that’s what Nature is, even at its wildest, it is the feminine principle to life, as opposed to the will and violence that haunt the halls of patriarchal civilization. Because even at its most violent, the mighty lion subduing the gentle lamb, I don’t think that there is any enjoyment implied or expressed, simply the fact of life that big fish eat small fish, no offense intended.

    Only we humans have the willpower to construct cities, or the conscious intent to choose vegetarianism, when it is not our historical path that has led us to that conclusion, but pure consciousness. Now I could be wrong, but I don’t think that it is likely that any other species will soon emulate that decision, though they may very well be vegetarian by nature, and who knows the path that Nature has bequeathed upon that other species, whose story we little know, and that has brought them to that conclusion?

    But now we have come full circle, from nature and back again and the only thing that has changed is that we are one step closer to a complete revolution around a celestial body that is in itself in revolution around a celestial body, in some giant circle dance in some giant sky that only makes sense from a distance. So we build cities and take what we want from Nature, gentle bountiful Nature, as if it were a stray lamb on the edge of the flock, and there must surely be more where that came from.

    But there is not, not in any accessible form, that is. Because we are limited by light and gravity, and the restrictions placed by that fourth dimension of Time. Almost anything is possible in Space, but Time in a single dimension is less forgiving than Space in three, and Nature is the perfect example of that. In more than one SE Asian language it is something like the Thai ธรรมชาติ, thammachaht, i.e. dharma jati, the law of birth, straight from the Sanskrit, as filtered through the lens of Buddhism.

    And that’s what Nature is, too, the law of birth, and death, as it pertains to our lives and those that we are privileged to share with. If it took a pandemic virus for us to see that clearly, then so be it, better late than never. Because the new normal will have to be greener and cleaner, or it won’t work. Mother knows best…

     

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