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this friday and saturday i have the good fortune of studying with his holiness the dalai lama on his visit to san francisco. the topic is interdependence, and his holiness will comment on two texts about it. here is stanza 2 from the first text (the first stanza is a traditional praise of the buddha)
2. Whatever degenerations there are in the world,
The root of all these is ignorance;
You taught that it is dependent origination,
The seeing of which will undo this ignorance.
so here the text begins by saying, in my interpretation, that understanding interdependence will cure all of the degeneration in the world. quite a statement. what do you think? how could something like ‘interdependence’ be such a panacea?
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just got this sogyal rinpoche quote. do you think this is controversial? outrageous?
At present, our body is undoubtedly the center of our whole universe. We associate it, without thinking, with our self and our ego, and this thoughtless and false association continually reinforces our illusion of their inseparable, concrete existence. Because our body seems so convincingly to exist, our “I” seems to exist, and “you” seem to exist, and the entire illusory, dualistic world we never stop projecting around us looks ultimately solid and real. When we die, this whole compound construction falls dramatically to pieces.
“I” definitely associate my body with “me”, as defining the boundaries of me. but i’m also not entirely consistent about it: if i were to lose an arm by accident, i would think i was still “me” even without the arm. perhaps i would be a different me, and others would experience me as different. but i would still be “me”. so the connection between body and me is not exact, though conventionally i think it is.
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spent a good chunk of this weekend meditating, and today practiced a bit with a visiting teacher. it was really wonderful to practice so much. i forget what a good long day of sitting can do for me.
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received a link this week to another talk given by shibata sensei where he describes kyudo - zen archery - as a practice of polishing one’s heart. in this video, the practice of kyudo is demonstrated. at about the 20 minute mark, sensei begins to answer questions from the audience.
a taste from the questions and answers:
so, a point that shakyamuni buddha made, was that when we look outside for instance and we see the autumn color and we say “ah, that’s so beautiful, the autumn leaves” it’s in a sense an illusion that all the color and form we see in the world that attracts us and delights us is very illusory and that actually it’s just a black and white world, there’s just form and emptiness, it’s very very simple at the base and we get seduced by our perceptions.
so all the things we think we own, like our shirts, and our nice clothes, and our house and car, and even the money that we actually think is our money, it’s all a rental, shakyamuni buddha said it’s all a rental, we don’t own any of it.
sensei saying there’s like a panic that could maybe almost exists in us, “i don’t have any money, i don’t even have a house” but actually if you have that sense of view that real understanding things come and go naturally. and somehow your car actually gets fixed. and you might run out of money here or you might not have a home and then you have a small home or a place to stay. there’s some sort of natural ebb and flow to what we have and don’t have and we can actually trust that. but i do hope you have good health and can work. besides that when you can put your effort into the world, things naturally come around.
then i thought this was interesting
question: how do you like america compared to japan?
answer: it’s your idea to think of things in that way. i don’t think of things that way.
sitting monkey is place where