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Illusions, Illusions

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I’ve written on this subject before on this blog.* But this graphic, it tells it all so clearly.

Here is a truncated (00:44 minute) version of Sam Harris’s truly excellent, argument-settling explication. I agree with him 95%:

Final Thoughts on Free Will (Episode #241)

  • * Search the blog under the heading of Sam Harris

Zen Master Seung Sahn on Breath

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For any kind of practice or study, it is important in the beginning to use some form or posture 🧎‍♀️🧎‍♂️. If you want to keep a not-moving mind, at first you must control your body …You learn to slowly breathe in and breathe out 🌬💨 of your tan t'ien, the "energy 💫 center" located just below your navel. Breathe in for a long time, and breathe out for a longer time. Breathe in, breathe out; breathe in, breathe out; breathe in, breathe out. This is how you control your body and breath. 

If you can control your breath, then you can control your mind.  As you slowly breathe in and slowly breathe out, your thinking slowly goes down, down, down 🧲. Your thinking becomes less complicated as your energy begins to settle out of your mind 🤦‍♀️, into your tan t'ien, your hara or center. In Zen practice, this is where you "keep" your mind -- in your center. This is a very important technique. 

Most people keep their thinking up in their head, or in their chest area. Actually, this is not so good. Your head 🧠 is your intellectual center, and your chest 💓 is your emotional center. Keeping your attention in your head makes your thinking complicated, and your energy goes up. If you keep your thinking and concern in your chest, you will naturally be pulled around by your emotions. Simply let your thinking come down out of your head and out of your chest. Your tan t'ien is your will, your "do-it center." As your thinking naturally settles down in your center, your thinking and your emotions become clear.

The Compass of Zen (1997)

H/T: Kwan Um School of Zen

A Merry Metaverse and a Happy New Black Friday

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Look what Santa brought. Happy now, human beings? We get so many Christmas presents, but really any “presence”?

This reminds me of why my Teacher used to say, “Be careful when you want a ‘good thing’. Because when you get a ‘good thing’, you also get its opposite. Then, you suffer. But you don’t consider this when you just want a ‘good thing'” so, human suffering continues, nonstop.”

Pretty soon the guy who owns a big blue social media site where I share these posts will be plunging the rest of our limited attention-spans (and our Palaeolithic emotions and medieval institutions) inescapably into whatever ‘bad thing’ comes along with this childish plan for a brave new world of total VR-based “reality” — “the meta verse” — as if the ripple-effects of that site on our psychology and our fractured world weren’t enough to manage!

H/T: Abhijat Kamiar Ehsani

Monday Lunch, Mun Su Am

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Homemade broccoli/celery soup with ghee; tofu and cauliflower stir fry; baby tomato and avocado salad; and a pomegranate juice with collagen and Irish grass-fed whey protein isolate; coffee.

I don’t think I’ve ever done any food posts before this past week. But, I get asked questions about how life is, now being physically limited to just a little life here in Mun Su Am, in an empty Zen Center shuttered by the lockdown made tighter over the holiday season. This should be the last post.

“What is Mun Su Am?”

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A reader of this blog messaged me today: “What is ‘Mun Su Am’? That’s been driving me nuts in your posts.“

Mun Su Am is the apartment, the connected (but separate) unit where I (and several guests, when they are in town) live.

Manjushri Bodhisattva is one of the four main bodhisattvas of northeast Asia Mahayana/Zen practice. He/She/It are its preferred pronouns. This bodhisattva represents the wisdom that is innate in us, uncovered best through meditation practice, and refined through life, especially through the power of Sangha. Manjushri (the name means “Gentle Glory” in Sanskrit) is always depicted with a gleaming sword. However, unlike other religious expressions, this sword is not wielded in order to punish or dominate or injure or kill. It is not the blood-soaked sword of the Christian crusader or of the Taliban, Saudi religious “authorities“, or the Iranian mullahs. There’s zero lex talionis here. Rather, “the sword of Manjushri” merely means the wisdom which cuts through all illusions, like a samurai sword. It does not cut through necks and wrists, nor causes anyone to cower or submit to anything.

From Wikipedia:

Mañjuśrī is depicted as a male bodhisattva wielding a flaming sword in his right hand, representing the realization of transcendent wisdom which cuts down ignorance and duality. The scripture supported by the padma (lotus) held in his left hand is a Prajñāpāramitā sūtra, representing his attainment of ultimate realization from the blossoming of wisdom. Mañjuśrī is often depicted as riding on a blue lion or sitting on the skin of a lion. This represents the use of wisdom to tame the mind, which is compared to riding or subduing a ferocious lion.

The name Manjushri, in Korean Buddhism, is Dae Ji (Great Wisdom) Mun Su (Manjushri: “gentle glory”) Bosal (bodhisattva). It is spelled 대지문수보살 in Korean hangul. The word “Am” means “hermitage”. Thus, Mun Su Am, my home in the temple, means “Manjushri hermitage”, the place to realize our “gentle glory”. And if you don’t realise your inner wisdom, your “gentle glory”, no one here will cut off your head or hands. But reality certainly might.

Here is a version of Mun Su Bosal painted in a large altar icon (a taenghwa, Tibetan: tangka) for the former Seoul International Zen Center at Hwa Gye Sah.

Because the dimensions of the painting for the space of its installation, the artist, the eminent painter Park Kyong-Gwi, of Seoul, has installed Manjushri on a lower plane, with no sword. What is special about this painting is that the painter has included representations that include all four classes of practitioners enunciated by the Buddha himself: Bikkhu and Bikkhuni (比丘/比丘尼: monks and nuns), and lay woman and lay man (優婆尼/優婆塞)– the sa bu dae jung (사부대중/四部大衆).

Zen master Seung Sahn (1927-2004) believed strongly that Korean Buddhism had erred, mostly through Confucianism, into making a Bikkhu-centric Buddhism, which put women and lay practitioners on a lower level. It is a Buddhism focused primarily on the practice of the Sunims, who also control all of the resources and operations of the temple-communities. In this way, the modern Chogye Order model is also anti-democratic in a way that the Buddha might blush to see — again, due to the particular social and historic experiences of northeast Asian Korea. He worked very hard to “correct” this, even appointing a divorced lay woman to succeed him as the head of the worldwide sangha he founded. He was criticised –and to this day! — for his insights and adaptations of the matter, by more conservative, tradition-bound and politically fearful elements of the Chogye Order. In fact, this painting hangs in the very Zen Center he founded, at his own base temple, where he strove to carry forward what he often fondly called “our Zen revolution”. And yet, within a few years of his passing into Nirvana, the new overlords of his temple cancelled out his innovations in favor of a return to more traditional modes of teaching, which continue to weaken the work of Buddhism in Korea.

I like this unique taenghwa very much because it depicts the harmonious elements of all of our practicing-community, in the very vision that Zen Master Seung Sahn strove to make real. It is the family of those who are waking up, and accomplishing this work without discrimination as to gender or race or calling in life. (OK, the monks and nuns do have better front-row seats here. But maybe you do get nice box-seats when you decide to go all-in on things.) The painting is also clearly multi-racial, which also reflects his teaching beautifully.