The Dhamma and my nuts

Ok, really it's Zazen and my nuts.

I don't know about you but in loose fitting clothes sitting down on the little Zafu, turning around and getting situated I almost always end up on my nuts. Or at least on my sack. WTF. Luckily this hasn't happened at the Zendo yet. Only here at home.

But it makes me wonder. I know it's going to happen at the Zendo some day. What really is the proper way to get your nuts out from under you in a Zendo/Temple/etc. When is it ok to lean back and jam your hand deep into the front of your pants so you can pull the little guys out from under you.

Because honestly I really can't concentrate on my breathing at that point.

Hard

It just got hard.
I don't want to sit, I'm tired and I want to go to bed. I almost didn't sit at all last night. I pulled it together but it was already almost 11 so I only sat for 12 minutes. I'm still fighting a cold and I can't be staying up till 11pm.

Tonight I don't want to sit either.

I will, and I might sit for 40 minutes (instead of my usual 30) just to force my way through.

But right now at this very moment I don't want to sit. I don't want to be Buddhist any more. I don't want all the work that's going to be involved studying and sitting. I don't want to have to deal with the changes, the ones that have already happened and the ones I have no idea about.

I don't want to have to figure out what the hell the Lotus Sutra means or learn the wisdom of non-duality.

But I will.

Two months ago I was ready to ask my neighbor to keep my weapons in his safe. I'd been having scuicidal thoughts often enough that I felt the simplicity of a handgun was starting to become a risky temptation.

You can't stop anyone who really wants to do it. I've got perscription meds that I"m sure would mix poorly if I took them together and draino and a big assed radial arm saw in the garage and any number of 100s of other things that I know could do the job.

But most of them aren't quite as easy or as guaranteed and will probably hurt like a bitch.

I haven't felt depressed enough to want to end it in about two months. I've been sitting regularly for just a couple of weeks longer.

Gassho

Progress towards shikan taza

So I believe I've made great progress in my meditation recently. Had something great at the service on Saturday.

I've had all these thoughts in my head and I fight to not hold on to them. but I always hold on to them and think about them. and I know I shouldn't be fighting so hard to not hold on to them.  I also have a problem with songs rolling through my head.

So Saturday what I did was just touch every thing that came into my head. Mostly I touched things I noticed. I focused on just touching anything I noticed. I said one word to describe it and lte it go. If the bell outside rang I said bell. If someone shifted their foot I said foot. If they shrugged I said shrug, if I was slouching I said straighten as I straightened my spine, etc.

I know that naming things in this way promotes segregation which is the opposite of zen but it helped me let things to. It also helped me not have a song in my head. I meditated again that night and it didn't work out very well but I did it in my cluttered busy living room not the zendo and I only did 10 mins because I'd done an hour already that day.

I didn't get a chance to discuss it with my teachers so I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. but when I try and focus on my breathing I can't focus only on my breathing I have all these other things I fight with. Doing this I actually got a bunch of breathing focus in.

WTF is the Dhamma

WTF is the Dahmma

WTF is the Dhamma (you're probably more familiar with it as Dharma?)
If you're Christain it's easy to tell what your religious text is. There's a book called "The Bible" and you're supposed to read it.
As a Buddhist we take refuge in the Dhamma. But I still don't know what that means 100%. The Dhamma, like the bible is the teachings of the Buddha, the words of the religion. But there's two problems with that.
First is that the Buddha's followers recognized from the moment he began speaking on his new 'middle way' that what he was saying was going to be important to people for years to come. So they vowed to preserve it, all of it. They memorised every sermon he ever gave and made him promise to repeat any sermon he ever gave when not around him. Then they set about repeating it to one another so they could all remember it. They even made sure to recite it in groups so that they knew it wouldn't get changed acientally year arfer year.
Like a religious game of telephone.

There's this thing called the tipitaka or The Pali Cannon. Pali being the language he spoke in. Essentially it contains every single sermon he spoke in 45 years. Ever word that came out of his mouth. Published in modern format it takes up 40 volumes, it's over 5 linear feet of bookshelf space and contains more than 20,000 words.

Jebus

Now there's a reason for this. One of the reasons there's so much to say is that the Buddha was very, very deliberate about tuning his speaches to the individual. So there's primarily 3 sections of the Tipitaka. Tipitaka is tip(three) taka (baskets) for the three vessels of knowledge the monks would pass from one another, the way a bucket crew passes water to extinguish a fire, in order to preserve the Dhamma.

One section is pretty much just for monks, people who wanted to lead a monastic life in order to help everyone else.
Another is for essentially the super smart. Intended for phylosiphers, drs, etc. It is apparently, haven't read a word of it, very esoteric and a bitch to understand. The longest section is for everyone else. Even it is broken up into levels depending on how deep you think you can handle it. From books like the Dhamapada which is like the easy readers guide to the Dhamma, it's tiny and really just has a bunch of short poems that say things like people who do evil deeds will feel evil hearafter. people who do good deeds will feel good hearafter.

So while there's a bazillion pages of of the Dhama even the monks aren't really required to know the whole thing.

ok, this really varies from Bhuddist school to Bhuddist school, the Tibetan monks for instance DAMN WELL expect the monks to know every word. Zen monks on the other hand could give a rat's bootie, they expect you to understand the meditation and thus yourself and thus the universe.

Buuuut it gets even wierder.

Because the stuff that's in the Pali Cannon is the really really traditional stuff that's the 'official' works for what's called Theravada Buddhism which is austensibly what was practiced from about the time of the Buddha, ~550bc, to the beginning of the common era (year 0.)

Around this time a bunch of Bhuddists looked at the bulk of Bhuddism and said "Wait a second, y'all are really getting way way to self involved, spending ALL your time in seclusion and not helping anyone but yourselves." Bhuddists have an obligation to end suffering. Not for themselves but for the whole world. At that time a few new books came about. Theoretically they are the words of the Buddha that were recorded while he was alive and hidden away for 500 years becuase we weren't ready to understand them at the time. (actual story unknown, I dont' have enough info currently to even speculate. They were guarded by dragons in another dimension for all I know.)

This was the birth of what's called Mahayana Buddhism. Mahayana Buddhism is a bit more palatable for most people and has a couple key points. It has a focus on something called a Bhodisatva. A Bhodisatva is a person who's taken a vow to not reach enlightenment on their own but to help deliver the entire world from suffering all together. The second is a good strong focus on meditation. Mahayana is the main form of Buddhism today and 99% of what we recognize is Mahayana, from Tibetan to zen.

I'm studying Zen, so now what do I do? Do I read the works of the Pali Cannon in an attempt to get 'back to basics?' Do I read the Mahayana texts since they're more applicable? Is it even better to just read the 25 million texts ABOUT Buddhism because they were written within two centuries of my birth and maybe in a language someone alive actually speaks?

It bakes my noodle.

ZOMFG the death penalty

Holy fricking crap.

I just became against the death penaly.
Literally less than five minutes ago. While brushing my teeth.

No that's not entirely true I was actually flossing with my waterpick. The idea hit me about 5 minutes earlier and I tried to resist it. Hoped I'd forget.

I've been pro death penalty most of my life. I've also been against killing, wars and violence in general* for most of my life. I have, however always felt that murderers and others that wreak havoc upon our lives should be culled. Not as punishment but generally as a cleansing of the gene pool.

No really. There's something wrong with these people. Yes upbringing is a possible source but by culling them off the way you would kill a cancer you A) Remove a source of the phsycopath gene from the gene pool and B) Show others that it's a BAD IDEA.
Now I understand global harmony and I love the idea and want the idea but the murderers are a current problem and global harmony is a future solution that we** are working towards.

But that's really the problem with the death penalty right there. It's just like your diet, or that reading you want to do or the excercise you should do, the gardening, the time with your kids.

It's always some day isn't it?

Some day.

But we all know some day doesn't come. It's bullshit. Some day is never today, it's always some day, out there, some place we look at. It's a dream, a lie.

It's bullshit.

And it won't be real until we make it real. It won't be real until we decide 'Fuck it!' Some day is today! So how will we heal the world if we don't start?

I know, I know, it's so much easier the other way. After all they're BAD PEOPLE. They really are. It's so much easier to want them punished. But that's like curing cancer by smoking. It sows the seeds of hate. Yes, more murderers are out there and more will come but how will we stop hate if we don't start? How will we end death if we don't start?

I'm such a fucking hippie some times.
sigh.

It was so much easier the other way. This is going to be hard. I don't like this idea but it's right.

Well, off to finish the evening with some Zazen. Maybe I should quit. This is the crap that's giving me this new clarity and all it's crappy revalations. ^_-


*except in sports conexts like martial arts.
** most of us.

Emotions

I'm getting to a wierd point in my Buddhist life around emotions. Logically I know I don't need them but they are escapable.
Let me clarify.
It's not like the movies where the zen master is perfectly austere and completely lacking in emotions. In the same way that our body cannot be separated from our mind our mind cannot be separated from our emotions. They're there, they're real. Trying to not have any is just lying to yourself and just as harmful as having to much of them. The goal of Zen isn't to become a soulless, lifeless robot who is completely disconnected from the world. Quite the oposite in fact. The goal is to have more love, global love, love for all things and joy at their existence.

What I really mean is to do is not be so attached to my emotions. The goal of Zen is to no longer NEED them. The way a child REALLY NEEDS that new toy, or that candy, or whatever that shiny thing that is on the shelf when you pass it in the hallway in some store and then breaks down into tears when you pass it instead of picking it up and putting it in the cart. There's no reason not to enjoy it when you get it.

But I seem to _want_ to need them. If I was a monk I'd strive to be less controlled by them. I'd see the emotion come, acknowledge it and move on. What we do in real life is see the emotion, grab a hold of it with both hands and wave it around, hug it to us, shout at it or put it on like a cape and run around the room pretending to be superman.

If I wanted to lead a more 'Buddhist' or especially a more 'Zen' life I'd not be quite so ruled by said emotions. And honestly I'd probably be happier. I wouldn't be caught up by every little twitch my wife makes I wouldn't be driven insane and unable to sleep by work.

But I don't want to become that austere. I'm full of life and vitality. I know I can be full of life and vitality and be spiritual but it's different. My teacher Jane Schneiders in talking about this once said "It's not that you become completely detatched and no longer feel love. In a sense you become a tiny bit more detached but you still feel the love. In fact you feel more. You feel it more broadly and more deeply than ever, but you no longer need (crave) it."

Which sounds awesome. I could have wild blindly radient love for the whole universe and yet be comfortable enough with myself that I won't feel like blubbering if my wife forgets to kiss me in the morning or if my daughter says she wants her mom to pick her up instead of me (Sometimes It's me sometime's it's mom. we can't convince her that whenever she says that she hurts the feelings of the other parent.)

However for some reason I don't want this peace. I don't want to loose my craving for emotions. It's like the emotions define me. The emotions make me 'real.' In a sense they do. Not the Buddhist sense, but a sense. They make me 'real' because they define this idea of me. This false me that we all have, you have, I have, my dog has. This idea of a permanent singular self that we cling to. In the Buddhist sense that identity is crap. There is no 'me' there is no 'you.' We exist as separate entities because we are defined as separate entities. Being attached to these emotions just further solidifies that idea of segregation, which segregates me from you or from an alpaca in Mongolia. This segregation is the cornerstone of the ignorance (essentially a Buddhist sin but we don't have sins) that is the main source of suffering in this world.

In 'Zen Wrapped In Karma Dipped In Chocolate' Brad Warner describes it that we're affraid to trust ourselves. Affraid to believe that we are an original Buddha and that this is in us." Well damned straight I'm affraid. I don't know if I want to be a Buddha. I don't know if I want to trust myself.

But yet here I am writing a blog about becoming my Buddha self. About bringing the Buddha, and thus, you and the alpaca, into my heart and my life.

le sigh.

Kamma

Kamma (pali) or Karma (sanskrit) is viewed in a lot of different ways. The most prevalent view being that it is some sort of cosmic currnecy. You earn good currency and you can spend it on bad things. You earn bad currency and you ahve to spend it on bad things. In the end if you have a shit ton of bad Kamma you become a dung beetle or get reborn in a hell inside of a mountain for 10,000 years or somesuch.

But like everything in Buddhism it's confusing when you delve into it in greater detail. On the outside Buddhism is pretty basic, pretty easy to understand.

Generally be groovy.

But that can be overly simplisitc.

I think it's important however to start with overly simplistic terms. I also think it's just as important to recognize that there are much much deeper meanings some of which can seem to contradict your overly simplistic idea (not in this case) but the overly simplistic term puts a qualification on the deeper idea.

The problem with overly simplistic terms is that people tend to just stop there and not recognize that the overly simplistic term is just setting the stage for a much deeper discussion. Let's take an example

Do no evil.

seems pretty straight forward. but then you dig deeper. Is unmarried sex evil if it's full of love and devotion? eternal love and devotion? Is marriage good when it's two people who hate one another who are 'staying togehter because of the kids' and all the while each one is telling the child aweful things about the other parent. Sewing seeds of hate and dispair in not only themselves but in each other and in their children?

There's nuances and in Buddhism the idea of nuances is more important than the 'rules' themselves. As long as you take the rules as a context.

So back to Kamma. Cosmic currency. In much thought Kamma is currency like money, you spend it. That means there has to be someone printing it, someone storing it in the back, metting it out when you deserve it taking it away and someone weighing it when you die.

In Buddhism Kamma isn't like this. It's like anything else in the world. You smoke, that contains carcinogens, carcinogens increase your risk of cancer. the more you smoke the more likely you are to get cancer. You eat vegetables, those are full of vitamins and minerals that your body needs to survive. Kamma is the same way. Nobody out there is going to decide that you effed up. Nobody is going to judge you against a yardstick. Kamma isn't something you're going to be able to hide or something you can weigh in at the end of your life. Many prison inmates 'find jesus' on death row. And I'm sure they really mean it. When they take jesus into their heards three days or six months before they die they really, really mean it. Because they're going to die.
Kamma doesn't work that way. Any more than you can be a drunkard eating big macs and smoking for 70 years and then eat 50 lbs of carrots a day when your doctor tells you you have 2 more months to live. It just won't work.
Kamma just catches up to you and you have to maintain it, always.
 Sure, you'll slip from time to time but heck some times those really healthy people have a donut. But usually we're in the middle somewhere. We try and eat healthy but it's a bit of a pain some times so we put it off until later.

The trick is this. First realize there's no later.

Second realize you're not perfect.

If you were going to drop all bad behavior, eating habits evil thoughts, etc. you'd go join a monestary and become a monk. But I'm guessing you haven't done that or you probably wouldn't be reading this. You have a job or school, you have a family, you have responsibilities, you have a cat.

You are who you are.* Just pay attention. Don't beat yourself up for making a mistake or lie to yourself and certainly don't tell yourself it'll happen later. Later is now, right now while you are screwing things up but you can improve, just a little and that's all it takes.

So just try.

just do a better job. Even if it's only a little bit better those little bits add up. Honestly if it was easy there wouldn't have been a Buddha. If it were even remotely close to easy we wouldn't have noticed the Buddha. In a gorgeous field of flowers how do you find the prettiest. We noticed the Buddha because he bloomed on a barren rock. Sure there were little flowers here and there poking out through crags but he bloomed bright and beautiful and stood out amoungst the rest.

Now here's something to bake your noodle. The Buddha clearly defined Kamma the above way. You have a lot of bad Kamma, you suffer. period, that's what happens, not because you're judged but because you just have bad shit that you've accepted. Now he also very clearly sayd 'I declare that cetana (there's a - over the last a,) which is translated as volition, as Khamma.

So is Khamma just thought? 'just' bad thought. if you kill people becuase you're crazy do you suffer Khamma? If you get cut off on the freeway and curse the guy do you get bad Khamma?

No

and yes.

One of the things that pushed me away from Christianity was a similar idea. The idea that if I thought bad thoughts I would be damned to hell. Mearly thinking 'FUCK' if I missed the nail and hammered my finger with a big fricking hammer Jesus would put a big check in the 'going to hell' column on my holy roster. This sounded dumb frankly. So here I am now becoming more and more deeply involved in a relegion that says "Mind is the forruner of all states" that is the very first line of a text called the Dhammapada. The Dhammapada is really like those little cardboard jesus for kids books. It's the shortest and simplest of all the traditionalal Theravada canon (think of it as 'old Buddhism.') It is the text that was designed to be able to be read by the largest group of people. If you wanted to you could read it in like 20 minutes or less.
which of course means I have a 10 lb version that is VERY thorughoughly annotated and each 8-16 word verse has an acompanying page to page and a half of story from the Buddha's life illustrating it and a ton of comments.

Now both of the first two verses start with the same 2 lines.
Manopubbaṅgamā dhammā manoseṭṭhā manomayā
Manasā ce pasannena bhāsati vā karoti vā

Which are pretty much "All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts." They are freqently translated more roughtly into something like "Mind is the forruner of all states"
each one is followed up by a slightly fancy way of saying if one's thoughts are bad bad shit happens (or follows like the wheel of a cart follows an ox.) and if they're good good shit happens.
But in the shorter translations each verse is actually translated as "Mind is the forruner of all evil states" and "Mind is the forruner of all good states" to simplify it a bit.

So here I am now following a religion that very clearly states that bad thoughts are bad.
The difference is context. In Buddhism we very clearly recognize that thoughts happen. They're supposed to happen. In fact one of the whole purposes of Zen Buddhism and Zazen is to _let_ them happen, rather than try and deny them. Having a bad thought isn't wrong. Clinging to that bad thought is wrong. When someone cuts us off on the freeway we're likely to have some defensive adversarial thought pop into our head.

That is normal and healthy.
let me repeat it.
when someone does something that risks your life and this adversarial angry thought pops into your head it is normal and healthy.

What is nor healthy but is unfortunately normal is for you to fume about it for the next 20 minutes. "That bastard" or even screaming out the window at the "Dubmassed jerk who just cut you off" Now you're generating a tremendous amount of energy, a tremendous amount of evil bad thought (and thus Khamma.) That is not only you but that is being sent into the world and will help destroy it.

So get the fuck over it. Shut up, stop talking about it, calm down, grow up, whatever it takes. Let the bad thought happen but then let it go.

*And so am I. ^_^

Some Progress 1

This is actually a bit late. I've pretty much made about six steps on my goal towards not hating everything about wife's choice of religeon but I had to get through those steps before I could be comfortable enough writing about them. Truth is I'm making a much bigger deal of it than she is. But I knew that would be the case. I'm the one with the problem not her.

Well I've been doing a bunch of reading. Read 'Living Buddha, Living Christ." by Thich Nhat Hanh. I'll be seeing him sept 19th. He's doing some speaking. Funny part is while my wife was searching for God she brought home "Jesus and Buddha as brothers" by him. I read about three paragraphs and said "Looks like it's just some attempt to make Christianity palatable for Buddhists. I have no interest in understanding and accepting them." Man, what a dick.

I knew subconciously it was her attempt to help me be comfortable with it but it didn't sink in that she'd already made her choice to be Christian. The ironic part is that she doesn't remember that book, apparently she didn't read it and now I'm the one getting the books and giving them to her. I'm not pushing the Buddhism on her but she's trying to understand it as much as I'm trying to understand hers. There's a bunch of concepts in Buddhism that are, to be honest, kind of odd and very difficult for most western minds to wrap around. I'm not really sure why I don't have a problem with it. I'm exploring that, more on that in a later post.

I'm a lot more comfortable than I used to be with the wife's choice. It helps that she's Catholic. Much to my surprise Catholosism is one of the most flexible. Supporting science and such things. hell the vatican is becoming solar powered. The most important part is the importance they place on helping people. The teachings of Catholosism and buddhism are actually very close. Jesus said go help people. My wife made a comment once. "There are two ways to view what Jesus said. You can focus on helping people here on this earth and pray as well. Or you can Pray constantly and focus on helping them in the after life. You can guess from the number of Hospitals with names that start with 'St. ...' which one the catholic church focuses on.' it really helps.

Tao (the way)

So I've started a spiritual journey. It's been tough. I am a little surprised that I'm doing it and it's not really the sort of thing I would normally have sought out.

The truth is I was forced into it. You see my wife found God. She's not being preachy or trying to steal the kids from me or anything horrible. She's been great about it. The problem is me. You see I have a problem with Christianity. I hate it, I loathe it, I feel that most of the terrible things that have happened in this world have been a result of it. It's a feeling that has grown in me gradually over the past 15-20 years. Or at least I did for about the last ten years until about six months or a year ago when I started to calm down.

So when I finally found out about the wife I had a crisis. I couldn't believe she had brought this evil into my house. I actually said that out loud in front of her can you believe it? After a while of reflecting on this. A while being months and months. Plus being torn by the fact that I love her dearly and that I respect her greatly I started to realize something very important. In my hatred of what Christians had done in the name of God I had learn to hate Christians. I had become the very thing I hated them for. A vessel of ignorance, hatred and intolerance. This had to change. A little history Some 20 years or so ago I was an avid church goer. During that period I learned of this ignorance and hatred and I knew that God could not be like this. So I found my own path. Over the next 5 years or so I explored myself and the universe deeply through contemplative meditation and developed some very strong feelings about how the world worked. They included ideas like reincarnation and the love and interconectedness of all things.

about 15+ years ago I discovered Buddhism. I was and still am constantly amazed at how much it matched my own explorations and theories and so I began following it. I'd already started down the path and here was a guide from those who had gone down the same path before me.

Unfortunately I didn't stick with it. The Buddha sort of moved from my heart to my back pocket. Buddhism was always something I would get back to. I've got completely unread Buddhist texts that I've had for 5 years now. Some day. I would get back into Buddhism, learn a bit more and start meditating again.

Well this was the day. See Buddhism speaks to me very closely. And one of the neat things about it specific to this situation is that Acceptance of other peoples religion is a requirement. No Buddhist who truly understands the Darhma will ever tell you that your religion is wrong, less accurate. So I'm diving in full bore. Grabbed a bunch more texts and I'm reading them. Some from the buddhist restaurant we go to for the vegitarian chinese food. Some online, some I've just had for a long time and don't know why. Some that folks have brought to me from taiwan or something. Others that I've picked up as giveaways and a chinese Buddhist restaurant.

Tao in Chinese means way or path. Both of these words are used to describe the Buddha's teachings. Both by him and by others. My initial exposure to Buddhism was essentially zen. But in the kung fu theathre sort of way. I got it from a martial arts instructor and a very good frient. I learned a lot spiritually from the man. I'm sure there will be more on him later.

Because the name was cool

That's why I picked it. My other blog (the hole in my head, which I'm not really using) still has a good name for the topic at hand. The topic of my progression in Buddhism. Who knows, I may keep that one and move everything over but this sounded cool.

I'm such a dork.

*Note, Most people are familiar with Karma, the 'cosmic currency of Duddhism, Hindu and others. Some people are familiar with Dharma, the budhist teachings. Well I've been reading Pali stuff (the original original language of Bhuddism. and Karma and Dharma are both sanscrit words. Translations but early ones. Pali ones tend to be a couple years later and there are still a few texts that haven't even been translate yet. So I will often use pali here. So Karma is Khamma and Dharma is Dhamma