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    hardie karges 4:34 am on June 29, 2025 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Denisovan, Floresiensis, , , , , , , , , , Zen,   

    Buddhism, Meditation, and the Zero… 

    We are all conditioned by language. So, try to watch your tongue. That is not a Zen koan, but it could be, since they speak to the same issue. Language is not always a solution.  Often it is the problem. And that places it largely outside the Western world’s system of knowledge and transactional engagement. Because, when Mark Z says that he wants to see engagement on Facebook posts, he’s not talking about flirtation and sweet talk (though that’s okay, too, I’m sure). He’s talking about verbal exchange, to the point of sparring and verbal disembowelment.

    That’s why many people love Facebook. And it’s why just as many hate it and go on to other social media. Because language is the world’s preeminent weapon, likely the reason why homo sapiens, aka homo vehemens, was able to defeat the Neanderthals and Denisovans and Floresiensis so handily and bodily. They had a not-so-secret weapon. The rest is history. The talkers got the spoils of war, and the others got shallow graves. And so, it is today. High-tech is our language.

    Enter Buddhism and the meditation that defines it. Like the zero, shunya, that gave its name to Emptiness, shunyata, we need that empty space to make sense of things. We need that empty space to return to our natural pre-linguistic awareness, sati, which predates the ‘monkey mind’ that language sometimes produces, and which must be held in check by concentration and attention. The world outside is limited, changing, and full of stuff. The world inside is infinite, eternal and empty. We only need that emptiness to hold it all in perfect place notation. That’s what zero is for. That’s what meditation is for.

     
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    hardie karges 4:33 am on April 27, 2025 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism Meditation and Emptiness 

     Meditation is the art of open heart and open mind, closed mouth, eyes optional. To me it’s almost amazing how many Theravada Buddhists don’t meditate at all, but I suppose that speaks to the time and the place as much as anything, as well as the ultimate goals and prime motives. Because a Thai citizen or resident doesn’t really need a motive to be Buddhist, except to be good and be social and contribute to the overall well being of the populace. If you’re already Buddhist, then you don’t really need a reason to be Buddhist.

    But a Westerner needs a reason to be Buddhist, and so for many of us that’s long been a choice of Zen or Vajrayana (Tibetan), two of the more exotic versions of the field, and so an attraction to those for whom an attraction is helpful. The only problem is that the Buddha himself might not recognize either of them as representative of his teachings. For us street-corner philosophers, that’s plenty of motivation by itself, the simplicity and veracity of the original message. So, now that Theravada is re-branding itself as Vipassana, pure and simple, that accomplishes a necessary goal, to get Buddhism back to its root without worrying about word games and past lives.

    Because Theravada Buddhists were always the best meditators, even if many never did it. And meditation can accomplish with practice what precepts and concepts can only suggest with words. You can talk about shunyata—emptiness—all day and not know much more than what you started with. Or you can sit silent unflinching for an hour while concentrating on breath and know quite a great deal, without uttering a word. It’s an acquired taste.

     
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    hardie karges 3:05 am on March 30, 2025 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism and the Pursuit of Truth(s) 

    Absolute truth is a difficult subject. But right speech is easy: honesty and politeness, no trash talk, samma vaca. Most truths are relative at best, anyway, and that includes science, but it goes double for superstition. Because science acknowledges its limitations up front, and that’s the best that you can do. Buddhism is pretty good about that, also, at least in its earliest purest phase, when control of the self (not-self) was primary and gods were kept in their place—somewhere else.

    Buddhist truths are limited to only a very few ‘truisms,’ which is probably more accurate than the notion of absolute truth. Those pretty much consist of the presence of suffering, the main cause of suffering which is the bad habit of craving, and the way out of that condition, which is the Middle Way, between luxury and lack, and strict adherence to the Eightfold Path. One key element of that is samma vaca, right speech. Then there’s right actions, right intentions, right views, right livelihood, and so forth.

    Add to that the acknowledgement of change, or impermanence, and the deleterious effect that has on us, and you’ve got the basics of original early Buddhism, before the verbal antics of Zen or the elaborate trappings of Vajrayana. It’s pretty simple, really, just do good things and watch your tongue, say good things or you could just say nothing at all. That works, too. Don’t worry about absolute truths. Buddhist Noble Truths are more than enough of a guide for living this life.

     
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    hardie karges 4:23 am on August 23, 2024 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , solitary confinement, , , Zen   

    Buddhism Loves a Sangha, but Loves Solitude, too… 

    Western psychology thinks solitary confinement is torture. Buddhism thinks it’s pretty nice—sometimes. Go figure. Because that’s exactly what meditation is, is it not? That and concentration, yes, exactly, at least in meditation’s original purest form, which is maintained to this day in Theravada Buddhism, so important there that it’s often called Vipassana by its association. And it’s true. I couldn’t believe it the first time I did a retreat in a Thai forest temple, laymen silent unflinching for hours, monks even longer.

    I haven’t witnessed that degree of meditative absorption in the Tibetan or Chinese temples where I have experience and knowledge, but it might certainly exist there. And Zen might be another level of attainment, since the name derives from dhyana, after all. All of which goes to make a distinction with the typical Western ‘guided’ meditation, which, whatever its benefits, I simply wouldn’t consider true meditation, maybe more like a ‘dharma talk’ if done well. But if it’s not a Buddhist meditation group, then it might not be a Buddhist talk. Hindus are still trying to reclaim Buddhism as their own.

    But the point is that, while solitude might be torture for some, it doesn’t have to be. And it’s more likely to be, I think, if you’re accustomed to living your life in crowds and constant confusion. For someone raised on a farm out in the countryside, what’s a little solitary confinement? Sounds like Sunday afternoon. Solitude can and should be something good, healthy, and productive. If they don’t teach meditation in prisons, then they certainly should. It just might save somebody’s life sometime.

     
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    hardie karges 3:45 am on April 14, 2024 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , Heart Sutra, , , , , Zen   

    Buddhism 101: the Middle Path is Easy  

    Muslims don’t always seem happy. Christians sometimes seem too happy. Buddhists seem just about right, more or less, give or take, on average, all things considered. That’s the middle path, that sweet spot somewhere between extremes, of luxury and lack, surrender or attack, white and black, better multicolor than random shades of gray. And that’s foundational to Buddhism, that lack of hard doctrine, much less dogma, in favor of an all-encompassing dharma based on principles on moderation, mediation, and avoidance of extremes and attachments. 

    “My religion is kindness,” the Dalai Lama himself once famously said, and that about wraps it up, on the foundational level, when combined with meditation as the finest form of practice. Sure, there’s the ontological primacy of emptiness, still, but that makes little or no difference in the average person’s life, it itself subject to shifting connotations and lack of definition, resonant mostly as the dueling protagonist in the Heart Sutra refrain, “Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form,” fully transcendent but ultimately inconclusive. 

    Buddhism is first and still foremost discipline, dignity, and detachment, far from the madding crowds and seething temptations. Control your mind to control your circumstances, especially when the likelihood of changing those circumstances is minimal. Choose your battles carefully. Save yourself, then save the world. That’s the best that we can do. Do it now. 

     
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    hardie karges 3:38 am on December 23, 2023 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism and Non-Possession  

    I travel these lands as if I owned them, when in fact I own nothing, not even my own body parts. And that’s good, because if I owned anything really and truly then I’d be attached to them, till death do us part. That’s no good, because attachments are tantamount to craving, and clinging, Buddhist no-no’s from the word ‘go’. Why? Because they’ll always cause suffering, later if not sooner, and that’s gospel, according to the Buddha. But that’s a sharp contrast, of course, to the typical Western habit of consumption and possession, as if the more we purchase, then the happier we’ll be. 

    Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. In fact, the truth is probably just the opposite: the more we possess, the more miserable we are. But don’t try to convince a rich person of that—or a poor one. Because the truth is not to be found in stats or specs, but in the internal subjective application of deep feeling to the miscellaneous circumstances of life. Scientific proof, and much less truth, can only go so far. You can’t prove happiness, any more than you can prove compassion. But you can feel it. And you’ll know it when you feel it.  

    So, that’s what’s important, and that’s all that we should expect from any religion or philosophy. Because science is better equipped to tell us what the universe is composed of, and how it works, so Buddhism probably shouldn’t waste its time rehashing old themes and memes from two to three thousand years ago as if deep introspection were capable of the same rigorous experiments as science. It’s not. Buddhism is here to tell us how to live our lives. Be kind. Reduce suffering by reducing craving. That’s all. Merry Christmas… 

     
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    hardie karges 4:17 am on October 1, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , Mughal, , , , , , , Zen   

    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 2:16 am on June 2, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , doctrine, , , , , Zen   

    Buddhism Basics: Discipline, Doctrine, and Devotion  

    Some people prefer devotion over discipline or doctrine. That’s fine, if the object of devotion represents truth, beauty and goodness. It’s all dharma. The simple fact of the matter is that devotion is a simple act for many people, much simpler than the ‘mind-training’ of original Buddhism or the intellectual rigor of much of later Buddhism, somewhat the opposite of mental training in fact, with verbal tricks and koans carefully selected for the very lack of logic which commends them. 

    And those Three D’s can work in any religion, Christianity included, and probably most especially, since Christianity is nothing if not a devotee cult, ditto Sanatana Dharma, i.e. ‘Hinduism.’ But for Buddhism it’s very arguably the lesser of the three, what with the Discipline orientation of Theravada, and the Doctrinal not-so-dictates of Mahayana, and especially Zen. In fact, Devotion typically defines the religious orientation, i.e. devotion to an all-powerful God, in the Abrahamic religions, often symbolized by the patriarch himself’s willingness to sacrifice his only son to show his fealty to God. Now that’s Devotion. 

    But’s it’s much to Buddhism’s credit that it has other options. Because anybody can do devotion, no matter how demanding the devotional object or subject. And in Buddhism’s full embrace of the 3D’s, not only can Buddhism be philosophy AND/OR religion, but it can also be art, and poetry, and therapy. Because that’s what Zen koans are.  

    And while that may not work for even ten percent of the Buddhist community, well, that’s an important ten percent, because nothing less then the Buddhist high concept of shunyata ‘Emptiness’ is on the line here, and that’s a tough row to hoe. The koans help. Put all the different aspects of Buddhism together and not only is it not self-contradictory, but it packs a powerful punch. That’s what’s needed.  

     
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    hardie karges 8:14 am on April 30, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , Huineng, , , , Zen   

    Buddhist Imperfection and the Crazy Wisdom of Zen  

    The Buddha never said we’re all perfect, quite the opposite. He said that we are nothing but ‘heaps’ of causes and conditions that he called skandhas. He never even said that he’s perfect. And those imperfections can be the basis for positive change. He DID list change as one of the causes of our suffering, but significantly less than that of the First Noble Truth—craving. Maybe that’s not surprising, from someone who was born into the lap of luxury, since change for someone of destitute poverty might only be for the better.  

    But that’s arguable, also, so let’s just split the difference and apply the Buddha’s own Middle Path to conclude that change can go either way, good or bad, which is convenient, since it’s inevitable. The point is that, in its origins, imperfection is at the heart of the Buddha’s vision, though the Zen sect of the Mahayana school would, like some Christian sects (such as Christian Science), reverse that position and argue that manifesting our innate perfection is only right and proper. 

    They also said that if you meet the Buddha on the road, then you should kill him. Hmmm. Obviously, there’s a logical explanation to that apparent exhortation to violence, but I won’t go into it. I’ll only say that I prefer a simpler approach to enlightenment. The Zen thing is to show the limits and traps of language, and I agree whole-heartedly with that, but I don’t necessarily agree to a Dadaist approach to it. One of the Christian sideline precepts is to say what you mean and mean what you say, (“Let your yes be yes and your no be no”), and they just might have that right. 

    No, I don’t think that anyone has all the answers, and it is to Buddhism’s credit that so much dialogue is allowed, and even encouraged, which promotes a larger dialectic. In fact, this is how the Zen master Hui-Neng upstaged the heir apparent to replace the current master, to whom he was only a rank (in)subordinate. Thus began the line of thought that we are not here to train our minds but to acknowledge the illusion of reality, so something like an alternative Mayanist (haha) school, which thrives to this day as subplot to many more orthodox traditions. We are not perfect, but this is why we practice… 

     
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    hardie karges 9:23 am on April 2, 2023 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism 101: Meditation with no Mediation, except the Middle Path… 

    If you’re sipping tea while doing meditation, then it’s not really meditation, unless you’re meditating on the tea itself. And that’s a very nice thing to do, I hear, and it would seem, though I’ve never directly participated in it myself, it being a thing very Zen-like, and my own practice being something very different from that, a more-or-less traditional form of Buddhism. But the result should be the same: a calm and peaceful form of abiding, insight optional. 

    The point is to be very aware of all things that are occurring, and with as few distractions as possible. So, in a tea meditation ceremony, the point is to be aware of all things involved in the ceremony, from the preparation to the smell to the little buzz of brain neurons firing. In traditional meditation the point is to concentrate on the breath or something else innocuous yet transcendent, to liberate the mind from its usual task of struggling for survival in a dog-eat-dog world.  

    In either case, traditional silent meditation or a more elaborate ceremony, the point is to be attentive to the point of hyper-attention and to not be distracted. Because, to be distracted is to disrupt the whole point of the meditation, which is sati, or awareness, and samadhi, a term variously translated as something in the range of feelings from absorption to transcendence, so akin to dhyana, the term from which the Chinese chan and Japanese zen derive. I still prefer traditional meditation, seated, serious, and silent, with some misgivings about guided meditations, but very open to more active but silent forms such as the tea ceremony and walking meditation.

    The problems arise with the lack of definition and subsequent degeneration of the form, but not to the point of dismissal. Walking meditators just might need to decide whether to walk fast or slow. A brisk walk can be very satisfying, but I’m not sure that it’s meditation. It’s probably best to master the art of silent sitting before any experimentation. The point is to reboot consciousness, starting at zero, with a fresh outlook on life, language optional, because language is the classic conundrum. We can’t live with it and we can’t live without it. Be safe out there.

     

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