The Buddhist

The idle stone age Buddha

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:09:57 GMT

What differentiates modern man from, say, the Kung Bushman who only has to labor about two and a half days per week, and of these days, for only six hours, is that the modern has a lot more desires—at least that is what I can determine.

When compared with the modern denizen stone age people, like the Kung Bushman, lack a lot of desire: they don't want very much, so they don't need to work very much. How pitiful is that—or is it?

If man has the ability to labor less and have, as a result, more leisure just "to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing" which Gertrude Stein said is what a genius does, then modern man must be incredibly stupid. But of course this isn't so—according to modern man.

Modern man is an incredible genius because he has lots of unfulfilled desires, burning ambitions, a thirst for unlimited power and, above all, a talent for inventing deadly weapons which he uses to conquer other people for their own good. Some of us, in fact, may remember the first lines in Rudyard Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden (1899):

Take up the White Man's burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

I know that when I first had to memorize this part of Kipling's poem in high school I was somewhat taken back by it insofar as my dad's family, because my grandmother was Native American, had to live outside of the city limits. No half-devil and half-children were allowed to live inside the city limits with civilized, Christian white people who had lots of unfulfilled desires they were working on.

Buddhism is not like this. First of all, Buddhism doesn't want us to multiply our desires. Basically, desire gets us into big trouble. More importantly, Buddhism demands a lot of leisure to actually have the required intuitions necessary to make any progress. Without the necessary leisure, such intuitions are impossible and Buddhism, as a result, becomes dry and doctrinaire.

Certainly, Gertrude Stein, mentioned earlier, had a better understanding of how genius is to be cultivated. This explains why Bodhidharma said, “A Buddha is an idle person. He doesn’t run around after fortune and fame. What good are such things in the end?”

Of course, living in America it is expected that one not be such an idle person like the Buddha—also a religious person can't speak ill of desire for goods. A religious person is expected to help the poor seven days a week if possible. The poor, evidently, lack enough talent to fulfill their desires—or someone with bigger desires came along and took advantage of them leaving them in penury.

At any rate, a religious person living in America is expected to help the world which is suffering from the Three Poisons of dull wittedness, desire, and violence. But of course, if we actually got rid of the Three Poisons, we wouldn’t have our civilization. We would have, instead, lots of idle people sitting around talking about the meaning of life, or taking long walks like John Muir, the great preservationist, who regarded Yosemite as “the grandest of all special temples of Nature.”

Leisure and/or idleness are underrated as possible cures for man’s burgeoning insanity if he can learn to accept them as the gateway to spiritual wisdom. But something tells me that civilizaiton is not ready for Buddhas or Buddha-like wisdom. One part of our civilization is busy pumping out misery like a German sausage machine, while the other half is ministering to civilization’s wars, diseases, madness, and poverty—all this in the name of progress.

Religion by statistics

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:29:15 GMT

Yesterday I came across an interesting reference to two Russian émigré artists, Komar and Melamid who, back in 1993, decided to employ statistical market research to determine what would be America's 'most wanted' and 'most unwanted' paintings. Needless to say their results were interesting if not hilarious. Eventually, the project spread to other countries with surprising and similar results. (http://www.diacenter.org/km/painting.html )

As I thought about this more, I wondered what might be the 'most wanted' and 'most unwanted' religion if one were to use modern statistical marketing research techniques in the determination. Surely, on average, there must be something everyone wants in their idea of a perfect religion. What symbol might they choose on average? What message might they wish to hear; and what kind of leading principle would most like to believe in?

As with the most wanted art in which, on avearge, most people preferred an idyllic peaceful scene with blue skies, would most people want a religion on the order of Mormonism, for example, or Catholicism—or even Buddhism?

In a study done over twenty years ago (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1980, 19(3): 292–298) it was found, generally, that all religions seem to have in common as regards their substructure three components (although not in this specific order): 1) the persistent experience of suffering; 2), a sense of injustice; 3) meaninglessness. On the same track, researchers in another study found that 'love', although not distinguished as a component of religion in the first study was, nevertheless, considered to be the most important ingredient in religion by 70 percent.

From this, a religion without some form of love, which would include compassion and caring, would be almost unthinkable. It would certainly be an unwanted religion that taught global destruction and eternal damnation. The most wanted religion might be one around the idea of a loving saviour who would end suffering, injustice, and meaninglessness. Moreover, one would expect the clergy to personify the ideal of universal love rather than be judges or prophets of doom and damnation.

But is any of this really religion? To be sure it is popular religion—what everyone would like religion to be, especially when it concerns love. But since when does the majority determine, for example, what defines true art or “beauty” and for that matter, religion?

Turning back to Komar and Melamid’s art project, why should some schlocky painting of an idyllic peaceful scene with blue skies and George Washington be considered high art? Using their methodology, if we were to follow a statistical formulation of religion, we might get something reminicenst of the religious view of Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944) who founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.

What Komar and Melamid demonstrated is that market research has its limits; moreover, that just because a lot of people like something, it doesn’t mean that it is consitutive of good art, music, religion or science. Indeed, one cannot have too much faith in statistics as Mark Twain remarked. They are worse than damned lies.

The greatest lie ever told?

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:43:55 GMT

When the idea of God comes into the picture of religion can it be said that religion has become a lie? And what if the idea of God turned out to be a corruption of attained spirit (tathagata) which, long ago, religious mendicants (rishi) uncovered during their meditations? Would it not be tragic, therefore, to realize that mankind has wasted its life on the worship of an imaginary concept put into their heads by power crazed madmen who could not converge with spirit, directly; who made God a projection of their own monstrous vanity?

In Buddhism, the idea of God is conspicuously absent. While the Buddha speaks of many gods, he flatly denies there is any such thing as a creator God. He even argues that if God is so all-powerful then why is every creature inflicted with suffering if it is within mighty God's power to give them otherwise?

Mankind is missing something very vital and important by its worship of God which only weakens the human spirit. It might even be said that with the more power we give to God the more we deprive ourselves of the necessary inner strength by which to search for the absolute as it really is—not as we might imagine it to be or deny completely.

The Buddha was a no nonsense spiritual physician who told us the real truth about life and salvation. He stressed that the bulk of our life should not be wasted upon craving which only serves to divert the proper dedication and attention away from introspection that sees the inner path. For indeed, there is an inner path within every creature that ultimately leads to spiritual freedom and emancipation from the continuum of rebirth.

Despite its great antiquity, Buddhism is still advanced as compared with most religions with regard to having surpassed the need for God.

Truly, a more advanced religion should put God in the dust bin where all the other past gods are. What should replace God is a science based upon the inner seeing or gnosis (jñâna) of pure Mind (cittamatra) which is truly independent of its dependent originating phenomena (mind generated artifacts). This gnosis is actually open to all to experience who might choose to undertake this vision (samyagdrishti).

With regard to superseding the makeshift ideas of good and evil based on a God's commands, what is truly profitable and best for all is the means of gaining gnosis of pure Mind. This is the highest good—there is none higher. And what is evil is all that which turns us away from looking within at our true nature which is empty of empty phenomena. Connected with this, there is no God to rescue us. God is man’s folly. In the immediacy of ourselves, we are already absolute. There is no other. But this only means something for us if we unfold it, actualizing it as a living presence. It will not suffice if we follow empty phenomena and, thereby, become ourselves empty; craving even more to fill up the emptiness.

All that we need to verify the pure Mind is within us right now. It is self-attracting and self-accomplishing if we but give ourselves over to deep and profound introspection avoiding craving of phenomena which are fundamentally empty and valueless.

Buddhist agnosticism

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:14:11 GMT

I know this may not chime right, but let me say it anyway. Buddhist agnosticism makes about as much sense as atheistic Christianity. It has become—sad to say—fashionable to discuss Buddhism cum agnosticism (I have found evidence for this trend going back to the early 1970s). But this is just so much codswallop.

It adds up to fodder for agnostics and atheists and other curiosity seekers who want to believe that the Buddha was a champion of scientific materialism which rests upon the foundation of agnosticism. But Dr. Trueblood, in the following passage from his book, The Logic of Belief (1942), provides a more accurate picture such agnosticism.

"Sometimes those who call themselves agnostics uphold a far less defensible faith. There are some who, impressed by an analysis of the conditions of knowledge, decide that knowledge is impossible. When they call themselves agnostics they go beyond the humility involved in "We do not know" to the dogmatism involved in "We cannot know." This last is wholly indefensible, because it asserts a really incredible kind of knowledge. We should need to know much more than we now know to be sure that it is impossible for the nature of the real world to be revealed to mortals. Moreover, the proposition is self-contradictory. Agnosticism is necessarily a limited creed, since, if it goes beyond a certain stage, it is self-defeating."

The Buddha never once claimed not to know. He was not an agnostic—not even close. The Buddha, as a matter of fact, in the Kalamas Sutta says that one should accept statements as true only when one has gained 'personal knowledge' (attana va janeyyatha, A.ii.191). The Buddha also claimed to have had higher and personal knowledge, which hardly strikes the most skeptical reader as being agnostic.

In addition, in the Pali Nikayas the Buddha said that he was a gnostiker (jñânin) as "one knowing, knows and seeing, sees having become sight and knowledge" (M.i.111). Adding to this, the Buddha is sometimes called "The knowing and seeing One" (M.ii.111).

Again, this is a far cry from agnosticism, to say the least!

The Atman Sutra that never happened

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:22:48 GMT

It is rather goofy for scholars and followers of Buddhism to maintain that the Buddha denied the Upanishadic self or atman, if for no other reason than the Buddha actually never discussed the notion of the atman with anyone who was its advocate, having claimed to have witnessed the atman.

If he did disucss the atman with someone who had realized it completely maybe the dialogue might have been something like this.

The Buddha: And what is your Dharma Atmadipa?

Atmadipa: Good friend Gautama, I am one of those medicants who has realized the true atman that transcends all conditioned things which are impermanent and sorrowful.

The Buddha: But good and wise Atmadipa, there is no such thing as the atman. Do you see it in your body?

Atmadipa: No, of course not Gautama, because the body is finite and subject to dissolution. Why would something like an impermanent body house the atman?

The Buddha: Okay, I get your point. Is the atman a thing or just absence?

Atmadipa: Neither, good Gautama.

The Buddha: So it is something, right?

Atmadipa: It is beyond categorization good Gautama.

The Buddha: Okay, does it survive the death of the physical body?

Atmadipa: Yes Gautama.

The Buddha: Is it like thatness (tathata)?

Atmandipa: In a way. It is not mere absence but neither it is something that can be sensed by touch, for example, or conceived by thought.

The Buddha: Well, you know Atmadipa, your atman sounds an awful lot like what I attained whereby I went to thatness (tathagata).

Atmandipa: That is kwel Gautama. I mean it is like it is something but it is nothing determinate if you get my drift.

The Buddha: Yep, that is it. You are IT where everything else is not IT.

Atmandipa: That is about IT! [laughs...]

The Buddha: Well, let's go for a walk. I know this great pool where we can swim which is by a home where we can beg for some great food!

Atmadipa: Sounds like a plan, Lord!

Buddhist nihilism

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:45:36 GMT

Buddhist nihilism doesn't arise out of the corruption of Buddhism, as if to say it has been wrongly interpreted. Corruption has always been embedded in human existence. It is not the cause of nihilism. Nihilism goes much deeper. It regards man’s very faith in himself.

Nihilism stands today at the temple gate of Buddhism when, for the majority of Buddhists, especially those in the West, transcendence, itself, has become a problem in which it is permissible to question the belief in the beyond (param) and its attainment. By analogy, the Buddhist nihilist learns to accept the role of the model prisoner, because there is no possible escape from the iron cage of sensory consciousness except in death. Those who say there is such an escape; who have dug long tunnels to find, much to their surprise, a deathless beyond to the prison walls, are laughed at, ridiculed, and attacked.

As we might expect, the greatest Buddhist nihilists rise to the rank of wardens. They are the ones who say that all is empty with deep conviction. These Buddhist of little faith have turned nirvana into entropy and the path into one of self-degradation. This is also destructive nihilism.

Nihilism has no cause in the sense of a causes b. It is more like this: A world conditioned by scientific materialism gives rise to nihilism. It is akin to an invincible madness that refuses to consider the substratum of thought, itself, except to believe it is neural. Thus it follows, that one perishes with the breakup of the body and does not exist beyond death which is also called the Yamaka heresy (S.iii.110) and was denounced by the Buddha.

Buddhist cults

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 14:38:35 GMT

The key element in cult thinking is not so much to have all the answers to a certain set of problems, but to create, instead, a world or a milieu in which the questioner feels they have exhausted all their questions, and the answers, which have been provided, have been adequate.

A true cult, from which our world ‘culture’ is derived, is not something so easily recognized, in other words. For the one caught up in the cult, almost all of their dreams have come true—but only because their cognition is extremely distorted as evinced from their repeated use of labels, over generalizing, and emotional reasoning.

For Buddhists involved in a Dharma center or mixed up with a Buddhist discussion group, a cult is easy to create and maintain. It takes on the form of what is known in military jargon as "incestuous amplification" in which one only listens to those whose beliefs they share; where there is a concerted effort for everyone to get in lock-step.

Cult dynamics are such that anyone not sharing a certain cluster of beliefs is asked to leave the Dharma center or is banned from the Buddhist discussion group. In fact, it is a fairly common practice. (I was once asked to leave a very distinguished Tibetan Dharma center directly associated with the Dalai Lama for asking a Lama what the Sanskrit word ‘citta’ meant from a Buddhist perspective. A white male, in his late 40s, who sort of led the group, phoned me up that night and said that I was no longer welcome at the center; that my question, in particular, showed ‘ego’.)

The Buddha was never a friend of the cult or incestuous amplification. In his teaching neither cult nor culture are valued. The Buddha wanted people to have an open mind. In the Kalama Sutta, which is intended for those seeking to find a worthy religion, the Buddha says the following:

“Now, Kalamas, don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, 'This contemplative is our teacher.' When you know for yourselves (attanava janeyyatha = atma-jnana) that, 'These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness' — then you should enter & remain in them” (A.i.188).

In other words, it is by self-knowing, that involves a noetic realization, that one makes their decision of which religion is the best for them. The selection process is not a rational process, in other words, based on credentials, formal logic, persuasion, etc. In fact, the application of self-knowing is not something a cult wishes its members to have since it is intuitively and universally grounded.

It should be stressed that Dharma centers and Buddhist discussion groups are primarily for those who are deciding whether or not to become full-fledged Buddhists. Those who are participants are trying to come to some kind of important noetic decision, on their own, that fully understands the direction Buddhism is heading. However, what is often the case is inculturation in which certain center leaders or discussion moderators make sure that new members are thinking in a cognitively distorted way. If they don’t, they are banned.

If one were to apply self-knowing (atmajnana) in their decision making process with regard to any religion, they probably wouldn’t choose any. For in all of them lurks the cult in which spirit is gradually bleached out of one’s being until one is totally personalized as an ego which is always trying to overcome guilt with the help of the cult and its leaders.

A word of advice. Beware of Dharma centers with strong leadership and beware of Buddhist discussion groups which have moderators. Incidentally, moderators are unnecessary. Google Groups has been unmoderated for years. The level of discussion on Buddhist forums such as talk.religion.buddhism is at a much higher level that say, Buddha Chat, E-Sangha, Websangha, or BeliefNet Buddhism. The latter discussion groups, one might argue, are ‘cognitively incestuous’ with often the same people belonging to two or more discussion groups.

Of a different bent

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:03:24 GMT

The are a great many passages in the Mahayana canon that speak of a transcendent Self (atman); something within us that interfaces with the deathless presence of eternal spirit (tathata). Here is just one example for those new to this treatment of Buddhism.

"The Atman is the Tathagatagarbha. All beings possess a Buddha Nature: this is what the Atman is. This Atman, from the start, is always covered by innumerable passions (klesha): this is why beings are unable to see it" (Mahaparinirvana-sutra).

But many of our dear Western Buddhists (not all, mind you) are of a different bent. They tell us there is no 'self thinge', as they like to say, despite passages like this one found in the Pali Nikaya Suttas.

The Perfect Buddhas who have passed,
The Perfect Buddhas yet to come,
The Perfect Buddha who is now,
And hath for many banished woe—
All dwelt and shall dwell: 'tis their way.
So he to whom the self is dear (attakâma),
Who longeth for the great Self (mahattam)—he
Should homage unto Dhamma pay,
Remembering the Buddha-word (A.ii.21, IV, III, 22).

Naturally, they have an answer for everything. Why this Sutta is an old translation they are quick to point out. So it is unreliable—yes, unreliable! Then they shoot back, "Nowhere does the Buddha define the Self!"

Oh really?

Where have these dunces been? Surely they've read, line by line the Dhammapada? Or have they?

"By the self (attanâ) the self is animated (codayattanam) by the self the self is controlled (patimase). The monk, who is self-guarded and mindful, will live blissfully (sukham)" (Dhammapada 379).

Well how do they like them apples? The above passage, as sure as there is samsara for those who attach to this temporal body, the Buddha has defined the Self. The Self or the Atman animates and controls.

Smuggling in a self

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:31:40 GMT

While modern Buddhists seem to enjoy attacking the notion of 'Self' or atman as if to say the Buddha denied it altogether (which, incidentally, places Buddhism in the category of being nihilistic) they are not adverse to singing the praises of holy 'awareness'!

Oh, and they do it so well and so inconsistently as you will see.

Ironically, these same Buddhists don't seem to realize that they are smuggling in Self in the form of awareness—a word, to be sure, that doesn't sound Hindu (is there a little bit of racism here?).

To reiterate, in books and on the Internet it is one mighty chorus of Buddhists of every stripe singing the praises and the glory of awareness. But how is their awareness, in likely essence, any different from Self as described in the Viveka-Chudamani by Sankaracharya, one of India's greatest saints and philosophers?

"This Atman which is self-radiant which is distinct from the five sheaths is the Witness of the three states: as waking, dream and sleep, the Real, the Changeless the Untainted the everlasting Bliss that, by the wise man as his own Self is to be realized" (v. 211).

As compared with Sankaracharya's notion of Self, is there a real essential difference between the "Witness" and awareness? I guess one might argue that Sankaracharaya's Self has more style or is more grandiose and supernatural. But at the core of the modern Buddhist notion of awareness, which is really a smuggled in Self or atman, there is not a dime's worth of difference between the two.

And for the record, how much is modern Buddhism's notion of awareness different from the Buddha's own notion of the Self as the "noble Witness"?

"The self (in thee), man, knows what is true or false. Surely the noble Witness, sir, the Self, you do misjudge, in that when sin is there you do conceal the Self within the self" (A.i.149).

While our Buddhist upholders of sacred awareness might decry the comparison as they hurl profanities at Isaline Blew Horner—who is quite dead—for her translation from the Anguttara, the fact remains that the difference between their holy awareness and the Self in Horner's translation amounts to a quibble.

Let me say, that no Buddhist in their right mind is going to try to market pure nihilism as if to say there is nothing in you dear human that is worth a damn—you're toast. They would be fools to do so. So instead of Self (which is too Hindu for some), awareness is made the holy of holies, that is, a smuggled in Self.

Buddha chat and Web Sanghas

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:44:21 GMT

One thing all Buddhist forums seem to have in common, with the exception of one I can think of, is they all espouse nihilism in the form of saying that the Buddha denied the atman or Self with a capital 'S'.

In the past, scholars like A.P. Buddhadatta, one of the greatest Sinhalese Pali scholars, have conceded that the Buddha affirmed the Self but did so implicitly through a negative methodology, viz., the via negativa. Other great scholars like Pande, Nakamura, and Frauwallner have tried to make it clear that the Buddha did not deny the Self. The Buddha only denied that what is impermanent and distressed could be the Self.

Over the years a few of us hardcore Buddhists have waged a lonely battle against the nihilist Buddhist forums and their staff who pretend to be Buddhists. The good news is, by and large, we are winning the battle as more and more people discover passages like these:

"The clear Self has been soiled by primal and adventitious defilements and (therefore) is regarded like a soiled garment which as been washed off " (Lankavatara Sutra Sagatham X: 358-59 vv. 752-761).

"For, truly if there is no personal entity (atman), there are no (Bodhisattva) stages, no psychic abilities, not highest initiation, and no excellent Samâdhi" (Lankavatara Sutra, X: 359, vv. 762-771).

There are many more besides these. But such passages don't serve the propaganda aims and the dogma of the Buddhist nihilists who also want you to believe the Buddha taught nirvana to be a kind of mystical death, since there is no Self. He didn't. The Buddha said, in fact, that nirvana is deathless!

"Nirvana; being himself subject to death, having understood the danger in what is subject to death, he seeks the deathless supreme security from bondage, Nibbana" (M.i.162–163).

In other words, one who wins nirvana, upon the dissolution of their physical body, attains eternal life—and survives!

The Buddha also said:

"If one sees samsara as impermanent and nirvana as permanent, his view is neither nihilistic nor eternalistic, but is the right view" (Maharatnakuta Sutra).

If you decide to join a Buddhist forum like E-Sangha or BuddhaChat take note of how these false Buddhists will try to sell you on the idea that there is no Self because the senses can't detect one. This is an inversion of the Buddha's teaching. It is not the senses which are the measure, but the Self. The Self, by removing what is transitory, establishes itself as a firm island (atmadipa) that cannot be swept away by the flood of samsara.