American Buddhist Perspectives
And a poem today from Martine Batchelor: Family time, Awareness time, Kindness in action. Read more
And a poem today from Martine Batchelor: Family time, Awareness time, Kindness in action. Read more
A very welcome sight awaited me upon my arrival home in Montana yesterday: I look forward to diving in between pre-holiday meals, holiday meals, cards with the family, and in-between-meal festive eating. You can see a bit here, and check out Arun’s overview of the Forum: Why is American Buddhism so White? here. Read more
Just a quick hello to say that I’ll be pretty busy with family and friends for the next couple weeks; you know, real life. So posting will be less frequent. As usual though, I’ve had several topics brewing that I would have liked to write about if time had permitted last week or over the weekend. But first, a video that reminded me of what it’s all about: I send out my gratitude to all of the hands, seen and... Read more
I have just heard from a group of enterprising and engaged students from (not too far from Bristol) St. Andrews in Scotland. Together they journeyed to Nepal with a mission to create the best documentary on contemporary Tibetan nuns available today. Have a look, stay tuned for the full feature, and give ’em some support if you can. We took our bags and camera to Nepal last June 2011 to make a film about nuns. Through this film, we want to depict them... Read more
Yes. For another week or so, you can get a free download of the Dalai Lama’s latest book, read by Martin Sheen, “Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World.” I’ve been listening to the first part of it over the last couple days and all I can say is, “wow, did the Dalai Lama read Kant?” Ethics going beyond religion? Based on some more fundamental aspect of humanity that makes us all perfectly equal? Huh? Yea, it’s good. Even better than... Read more
Or: what I happen to be reading now. Transgender Buddhists, Buddhist Monastics and allegations of abuse, and Was there a Buddha? This week we celebrated Rohatsu, the Japanese Buddhist celebration of the Buddha’s enlightenment. For Theravadins, he was born, enlightened, and died on Vesak, which falls in May or June in many places, or April in China, Japan, Korea according to wikipedia – which seems to mean that Japanese Buddhists celebrate the Buddha’s enlightenment twice. In any case, along with very... Read more
In 1.5 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observes that there are three types of life thought to be happy: the life of enjoyment, the political life, and the life of contemplation. The life of enjoyment is a hedonistic life focused on conventional pleasures. The political life is the life of a states- person. It may aim at despotic power, or be lived for the sake of winning public honors, but in its most proper form its aim is the exercise of moral virtue and political and... Read more
This week’s amazingly close yet opposing posts by Jayarava and the Zennist reminded me of the amazing abundance and diversity of Western Buddhist’s views regarding science. First (actually late last week), Jayarava wrote “On Credulity,” expressing a bit of amazement that educated people today still believe in the mystical qualities of crop circles, psychics, and chiropractors – all of which seem to have the same level of scientific veracity: zero. Jayarava writes that for instance: In 1986 Randi exposed Peter Popoff as the... Read more
Recently I was sent two DVD Screeners, this one, about the life and times of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and another called “Force of Nature” about the Japanese-Canadian scientist and environmentalist David Suzuki. I will review the Suzuki movie later this week, and today I’ll write a bit about the Trungpa flick. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who was born in Tibet prior to the Chinese invasion, lived, quite frankly, a crazy life. Yet his charisma in teaching the Dharma and ability to... Read more
A friend of mine studying at a certain Ivy League university posted this on Facebook today: Sign at the divinity school: “I believe that HEAVEN and HELL are REAL! Do you?” Scrawled comment #1: Depends on what you mean by “heaven” and “hell”. Comment #2: How do you define “real”? Comment #3: Or “believe”? Comment #4: What is this “I” and “you” of which you speak? Read more
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