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  • hardie karges 6:47 am on October 9, 2022 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , kileshas, , , raga,   

    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…

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  • hardie karges 11:44 am on July 17, 2022 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , id, , , , raga, ,   

    Buddhism 101: Anger is a Warning Sign of Impending Danger… 

    Anger is like a lying dog, that, when provoked, rises up in consciousness, and strikes the nearest hand that most recently fed it. Because it’s blind, and usually vicious, hatefulness optional, and it infects everything it touches, anger does. But it’s not always so easy to recognize, because it comes in many forms, most often in concert with hatred, true, but equally conversant with deception and denigration and the other delusions of sense perception, always a prime source of suffering, no matter the particular place and time in question…

    And then there is the other ‘poison’ of Buddhism, besides hatred and delusion, which is greed, or sensual desire, with which anger is also often associated. But sometimes the symptom is worse than the disease, and this could often be one of those cases, in which the anger is worse than the moha, raga, or dvesha itself. These are also variously known as the Three Unwholesome Roots and the Three Kileshas, which are also available in a convenient Five-Pack for serious abusers, but who’s counting?

    Still, it all counts as demerit in a lifestyle that prides itself on making merit, and doing good, and so worth making a sea change in order to avoid the choppy waves, right? But that gets into issues of global warming and rising sea levels, when simply wearing a life jacket and learning how to swim might accomplish much the same thing in a much shorter amount of time. Why get a brain operation if a pill can cure the headache? That’s what I want to know.

    Hatred, delusion, and greedy attachments can take a lifetime to cease, overcome, or even diminish, much less cure, though, so in the meantime please do us all a favor and control your anger, okay? It becomes you. And there are many American Buddhist ‘teachers’ who might disagree with that, but they may not be so smart, after all, since they often look to Freud and Jung, rather than Buddha, for inspiration, as if the notion of superego were somehow scientific and Freud’s ego were what the Buddha was really talking about in denouncing the Brahmanistic cosmic atta/atman. It wasn’t. So, let go of all anger, the sooner the better. It sucks.

     
  • hardie karges 10:44 am on August 9, 2020 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , raga   

    Hatred is the Worst Virus, and One of the Three Buddhist ‘Poisons’… 

    Hatred is the worst virus, because it lets you live to spread it. It can be cured by consciousness, fortunately, and that is the good news, because the bad news only gets worse, and that is the fact that some people swear by it. That is, they exist to hate, inspired by its call to action, and by its certainty of conviction…

    This is one of the three Buddhist ‘poisons’ of hate, delusion, and greed, of course, and by far the worst, IMHO, because it involves other people by its very definition. The self-delusion of moha can be confined within the convenient boundaries of self, even if those boundaries are all temporary and artificial…

    And the greed of raga can be mitigated by degrees until it poses little threat to bystanders and fellow travelers. But the hatred of dvesha, even in its mild form of aversion, has devastating social consequences, and is rarely left to stew in its own juices without bubbling over to infect and infest the surrounding perimeters…

    Because this is the heart and soul of racism, that seething contempt for what is other, instead of embracing it, and notwithstanding that what is Other was once all one, and only destined for Otherness by the immutable laws of evolution. So hatred is also self-hatred and that is a pit of despair and hopelessness from which few can ever escape…

    We see that every day in the politics of exclusion and exclusivity, in which hatred becomes the defining fact of our existence, due to misplaced attributions of national superiority, based on no evidence of the sort. Genetic science now proves our common origins beyond a shadow of a doubt, and the details of that diaspora only await final delineations and descriptions to be complete…

    Race is an illusion, and the idea that we are all simply a product and foregone conclusion of a predetermined birth is a myth. Free will is not absolute, but it exists at least to a great enough extent that we are all responsible for our actions. So we should be certain that all our actions are good ones…

    And if we do that, then the odds are high that the favor will be returned, if not directly, then indirectly, often by the most circuitous route imaginable. For if the former action merely results in a transaction, then the latter is karma, pure and simple. Life is full of little cruelties and kindnesses. I recommend the latter…

     
    • Mark Tulin 12:40 pm on August 9, 2020 Permalink | Reply

      so true, and it feels it’s spreading just as much as the coronavirus

      • hardie karges 1:14 pm on August 9, 2020 Permalink | Reply

        Yes, new meaning to the term ‘going viral’, not so funny right now. Thanx for you comment…

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