sitting monkey is place where
david evans
writes about meditation, buddhism, and related topics.
peaceful warrior the movie is doing well in its release, its now opening in more cities across the west and east coasts. here’s the trailer for the film and another short clip and an interesting interview with nick nolte about it.
i just received an email that described meditation and buddhist study as a way to “begin to dissolve one’s habitual karmic knots”.
i’ve definitely felt more groundless from all my recent practice and study.. i also feel like much of what used to feel really important to me is a lot less so, now that i’m back. i guess that’s a way of describing dissolution of some karmic knots. the habitual way i used to relate to things would mean if they arose, there was only one way i was going to relate to them. now it’s frequently more neutral for me. i still get excited about things, but with a little less sense of ‘urgency’ or ‘immediacy’. that’s how it has been feeling for me these last two months. it’s helpful to write about it, i’m still searching for words to describe my experience of being back.
i’ve been thinking about mandalas quite a lot these last couple weeks, not the art form but the more conventional buddhist usage that i described in my previous post. the buddhist teachings i’ve heard say that attachment to these mandalas of our life is the basis of our suffering.
but the contemplation is continuing my now long-standing existential crisis; one result of my buddhist studies. if all mandalas or microcosms of human experience are subjective and impossible to prove inherently existent, then how can i accept meaning in desires or goals? the study of mahayana buddhism holds the risk of nihilism, which is then countered in specific ways.
mandala is a central concept in tantric vajrayana buddhism. it also has developed a more conventional usage as buddhism has come to the west, to mean simply the microcosms that we experience in our life. you could say maybe the ’stories’ that we have about our environment, our life, about our situation.
so in that usage, who we think we are at work and our situation at work would be a mandala. like the paintings of mandalas that situation contains people and places and dramas. but unlike the buddhist mandala paintings, our situation at work is probably not experienced by us as enlightened energy or wisdom embodied. it’s helpful for me to think of work as a mandala though or as a self contained situation that i relate to. that mandala was created as i started working on that project, evolves as i get to know the people and the issues more intimately, and will dissolve when the project completes.
the interesting take on mandalas in this conventional use of the term, is that none of them really exist. they are a projection of our mind. sure you could say that work exists, that the people exists, that the issues are real, but for each of us in that work situation we all see each other a little differently, we see the issues from different perspectives, we even experience the environment uniquely. so which is the real, existent situation? is one of our views true and the rest subjective? no, all of our views of that mandala are subjective. therefore, the mandala is inherently each a projection of our respective mind holding a view. there’s no way to know if there is an existent basis for those views, because everyone’s view is subjective and we then cannot find one person who definitively has a true, existent view.
the fourth of july in america celebrates a particular mandala, the mandala of america as a nation itself. like all things, america was created, is evolving, and someday will dissolve. also, it is a projection of each of our minds. each person in america or outside of it has a subjective view about what america is and what it does and what is in it. if someone has any thoughts about america they go into that person’s mandala about it. therefore, there is no truly existent america. all views of america are inherently subjective. we may share certain opinions about america with many other people though, even though we cannot say that america actually exists inherently.