Lovin' The Ones You Hate

"The adversities that other people bring us are gifts, not betrayals. Disappointments try our patience and compassion. If our lives are completely sheltered and blessed, we have no friction to use as raw material in our practice. We will never conquer our ego if we are spared from every single upset and provocation.

"Atisha was known to travel with an attendant who was terribly bad-tempered. The man was irritable and very rude to everyone. People could not understand why a kind and wise teacher like Atisha permitted this nasty man to accompany him on his travels and they asked him how he put up with it. Atisha answered that the man was his 'patience tester' and very precious to him.

"Our efforts to generate compassion are always in connection with other people and our progress depends on these relationships. The people we live and work with and who share our lives are the sentient beings for whom we seek enlightenment. They are also the means of acquiring wisdom and patience on the way to enlightenment. Rather than feeling insulted or victimized by those who have been unkind to us, we bear the discomfort and feel thankful towards it."


Ringu Tulku Rinpoche
Mind Training

It Ain't What You Think

A year ago i was lamenting that finding an affordable copy of Daitō Publishing Company's Japanese-English Buddhist Dictionary (Nichi-Ei Bukkyō Jiten) was impossible. A few used copies were available, but they cost about $100 plus unimaginable shipping because they were coming from overseas. New copies cost the same. Imagine my surprise, then, when i logged into my Amazon account a few weeks ago and, lo and behold, there was one copy being offered by someone on the west coast for $30! I'm now the proud and happy owner of that copy — it came in today's mail. :-)

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Continuing to follow more of Uchiyama Kōshō's thoughts, here is some of what i've been mulling over most of the day. I spent the entire day on just one chapter of his book How To Cook Your Life, his commentary on Dōgen's Tenzo Kyōkun. Note, the paragraphs below aren't in the order they appear in the book.

"All too often we while away our lives, creating general assumptions and ideologies out of the thoughts that arise in our minds, and, after having fabricated those ideas, we finally dissipate our life energy by living in the world we have abstracted from them. 'The dharma should be grasped so that mind and object become one,' means that we must see all of the worlds that our lives encompass from the foundation of our own personal life experience; our life experience is our mind. This means that all things in life function as parts of our bodies."

"When we look at a cup that is set down between two of us, we have the feeling that we are looking at the same cup, though actually, that is not so. You look at the cup with your vision, and from a certain angle. Moreover, you see it in the rays of light and shadows that come from your side of the room. This applies equally to me as well. In a very rough sense, we proceed to separate the reality of the situation by entertaining the idea that we both see the same cup. This is what I mean by the fabrication of ideas."

"To talk of our being alive implies at the same time that there is also a world of phenomena in which we live. We usually assume that the world existed long before we were born and that our birth is our entrance onto the stage of an already existing world. At the same time, we often assume that our death means our departure from this world, and that after our death this world continues to exist. Within this way of thinking a fabrication is taking shape which is not the actualization of reality itself. The actuality of the world that I live in and experience is not merely a conglomeration of ideas and abstractions."

"[W]e wind up thinking that we live and die within this world of fabrication. This is an utterly inverted way of looking at one's life. My true Self lives in reality, and the world I experience is one I alone can experience, and not one anyone else can experience along with me. To express this as precisely as possible, as I am born, I simultaneously give birth to the world I experience; I live out my life along with that world, and at my death the world I experience also dies.

"From the standpoint of reality, my own life experience (which in Buddhist terminology equals mind), and reality (which means the dharma or phenomena I encounter in life) can never be abstractly separated from each other. They must be identical."

"Shin, or mind, in terms of bodhidharma should be understood as: the mind that has been directly transmitted from buddha to buddha is that mind which extends throughout all phenomena, and all phenomena are inseparable from that mind. My personal life experience is at the same time the world of reality. Conversely, the world of reality constitutes my mind."

"[I]f we are not careful we are apt to smother the vitality of our lives through the fabrication of our ideas. The teachings of the Tenzo Kyōkun operate from teh foundation of the reality of life to thoroughly cut through the ideas and homespun philosophies we so often set up and attempt to carry out, and rather, seek to truly allow that reality to function in our lives."


Kōshō Uchiyama
How To Cook Your Life: From The Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment

My own life experience and reality can never be abstractly separated from each other. They must be identical.

My personal life experience is the world of reality; the world of reality constitutes my mind.


Mind extends throughout all phenomena, and all phenomena are inseparable from mind. (Isshin issaihō, Issaihō isshin).

I think i'm going to spend the next several days working on this chapter before moving on.

Are You Calling Me Pathetic?

Thoughts to throw away:

"'No gaining, no knowing' is the attitude of refraining from all fabrication. In other words, it means to be free from the ideas we make up in our head. I call this opening the hand of thought.

"When we think of something, we grasp it with our minds. If we open the hand of thought, it drops away. This is Dōgen Zenji's famous phrase shinjin datsuraki ('dropping off body and mind').

...

"[T]he more we practice opening the hand of thought, the clearer it becomes to us that 'self' is not the same as 'thought.' We come to see decisively that the true self is not something made up in our heads. True self is the self of everything, the self of the whole dharma world, the original self that is manifest when we let go of thought.

...

"To spend your life being blinded and dragged around by your own desires is a pathetic thing. However you live, what you do with your life depends on you. With that understanding, just sit silently for ten years, then for another ten, and after that, for ten more years.

Kōsho Uchiyama
Opening The Hand of Thought

Along with Dainin Katagiri's Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time, maybe what i currently consider the two best explanations of what Zen is really all about.

Really, I Didn't Mean It

Most people, i think, worry all too much about what their actions are, ignoring to a great extent the thoughts and intentions that drive those actions. As David Loy explains however, Buddha made it very clear that intentions rule.

...

This points to the demythologized meaning of karma, including the revolutionary Buddhist emphasis on cetana, the primary role of one’s intentions and volitions. The Buddha transformed earlier approaches emphasizing sacrifice and other rituals into an ethical principle by focusing on our motivations. "It is cetana, monks, that I declare to be karma. Having willed, one performs an action by body, speech and mind."

What distinguishes our actions from mere behavior is that they are intended. Some such understanding of karma is implied by anatta, the denial that "I" have any unchanging, hard core of substance or svabhava, self-essence. My subjective sense of self is a construct, and the most important components of that construct are habitual tendencies (sankhara), which mold character and constitute "my" karma.

According to this interpretation, karma is not an inescapable law of the universe involving some precise calculus of cause and effect. The basic idea is simply that our actions have effects—more precisely, that our morally relevant actions have morally relevant effects that go beyond their utilitarian consequences. In the popular Buddhist understanding, the law of karma and rebirth is a way to get some control over what the world does to us, but I am suggesting that karma is better understood as a key to spiritual development: how one’s life-situation can be transformed by transforming the motivations of one’s actions right now.

Anatta means that my karma is not something I have, it is what "I" am, and what I am changes according to my conscious choices. "I" (re)construct myself by what "I" intentionally do, because "my" sense of self is a precipitate of habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Just as my body is composed of the food I eat, so my character is composed of my conscious choices, constructed by my repeated mental attitudes. This implies that we are "punished" not for our sins but by them; and happiness is not the reward for virtue but virtue itself, as Spinoza claims in the last proposition of his Ethics (V.42).

Karmically, the issue is not so much what we have done as what we have become, and what we intentionally do is what makes us what we are.

An anonymous verse sums this up quite well:

Sow a thought and reap a deed
Sow a deed and reap a habit
Sow a habit and reap a character
Sow a character and reap a destiny

David Loy
Awareness Bound And Unbound: Realizing The Nature Of Attention
(My underline)

I just can't think of anything that needs to be added. Karma isn't something you have, it's what you ARE. As you intend, so you will do. As you repeatedly do, so you become. What you become defines your life. Do good, you are good, your life is good. Do bad, you are bad, your life is bad.

You Don't Say

It's that time of year again.....


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I dug out the David Loy article that i was talking about yesterday. It was called The Difference Between Samsara and Nirvaṇa and is well worth reading if the topic interests you. The section i was remembering as i wrote yesterday's post was:

The fundamental difficulty with craving is that it generates a sense of duality — "I" desire that "thing" which, more fundamentally, I already am. The problem of re-presentation is that it widens the gulf between the "I" and the "object." I re-present a particular "object" by calling it, say, an "urg." This enables me to refer to the "object" even when it does not immediately appear. But when the appearance is again introduced, the re-presentation "urg" does not disappear, as having no more function. It still re-presents the appearance. Now we know what the appearance is. It is "urg"; or it is a particular instance of a universal: "an urg." Now I experience the appearance "through" the re-presentation. The problem is that, the more successfully a system of representation functions, the more likely we are to confuse the representation with the appearance. So tathata, the "thusness" quality of things as they really are, is subjected to vitarka, conceptualizing, and to vikalpa, false imaginings, which filter and distort sense experience; we are urged to "cut through" this "fog of concepts" if we want to realize the true nature of the world. Mahayana emphasizes this problem of conceptualizing more than Theravada, which emphasizes craving generally. In fact this is the source of much of the quarrel between them: Mahayanists criticize Theravadins for reifying the Buddha's words into a doctrinal system, and the paradoxes of the Prajnaparamita sutras may be understood as an attempt to avoid that pitfall.

But there is a serious confusion in the above analysis. It is not the case that the presented world is divided up into grasped "objects" which we later re-present; rather, we divide up the world the way we do (that is, learn to notice what is present) with a system of representation. John Searle, a contemporary philosopher of language, explains this well:

... I am not saying the language creates reality. Far from it. Rather, I am saying that what counts as reality... is a matter of the categories that we impose on the world; and those categories are for the most part linguistic. And furthermore: when we experience the world we experience it through linguistic categories that help to shape the experiences themselves. The world doesn't come to us already sliced up into objects and experience: what counts as an object is already a function of our system of representation, and how we perceive the world in our experiences is influenced by that system of representation. The mistake is to suppose that the application of language to the world consists of attaching labels to objects that are, so to speak, self-identifying. On my view, the world divides the way we divide it, and our main way of dividing things up is in language. Our concept of reality is a matter of our linguistic categories.

Such an approach is reminiscent of Kant's distinction between things-in-themselves and phenomenal things-as-we-perceive-them — the same distinction we have made in order to distinguish samsara from nirvana. In place of Kant's twelve "Aristotelian" categories Searle offers language, "our system of representation." Searle and Kant both doubt that it is possible to experience "things-in-themselves," but the contemporary view seems to leave the door open in a way that Kant did not: Is it possible to get behind language? Is that not what occurs in meditation, when one "lets go" of all ideas and concepts?

"Our concept of reality is a matter of our linguistic categories." That's so true and, i think, one of the biggest problems we deal with today as a civilization. Every culture, every religion, every political party, every you-name-it has their own linguistic categories that define what "reality" is. These categories are so fixed in stone that they preclude almost any chance of compromise with others who believe differently, and because the categories are so tightly locked, their owner's minds are just as closed, for fear that they could find themselves in a position where they could be labeled as traitors to their cause.

In fact, i might go so far as to say that i think a great many people no longer think on the level of ideas. Instead they think solely down on the level of language, where the words alone define their reality. Every idea, at least every credible idea, allows that there will be, must be, compromises inside the idea in order for it to be held by groups of people. Words alone don't allow this possibility. If we hope to survive as a civilization we need to come back to the realization that ideas are of more value than simple words.

Words can not, do not, and never will define reality.

Existing Inside Words

I'm not smart enough to figure out computer problems, so in order to have my browsers talk to the 'net, i'm just going to leave the broken part of my antivirus software turned off and hope it fixes itself, just like it suddenly broke itself. Therefore....... on to more interesting topics.

This from a very interesting paper by B. Alan Wallace called Intersubjectivity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.

The fourteenth-century, Tibetan Madhyamaka philosopher Tsongkhapa asserts in this regard: ‘Although the objects of perception have forever utterly lacked a final self-nature or objective existence, nonetheless they indisputably appear with the nature of having real, inherent existence... These things function conventionally on the basis of the laws of interdependence and causality.’ ... According to this view, the objects of perception — colours, sounds, smells and so forth—do not exist in the objective world, independently of the sense modalities by which they are perceived. But, for example, do trees exist apart from our perception of them? The Madhyamaka answer is that trees and the many other objects in the natural world do indeed exist independently of our perceptions. Flowers continue to grow and bloom when no one is looking, and trees fall to the forest floor, sending out ripples in the atmosphere and over the ground, and then begin to decay,whether or not anyone is there to witness these events.

One may then ask: ‘Do flowers, trees and other natural phenomena exist independently of any conceptual designations of them?’ To this the answer is that the words ‘flowers’, ‘trees’ and so on have no meaning apart from their definitions which we have attributed to them. Thus, the question has no meaning. But we may then push this point and ask: ‘Does anything exist independently of human language and thought?’ This question implies that the word ‘exist’ is somehow self-defining, that it stands on its own, independent of any consensually accepted definition. But all terms such as subject, object, existence, reference, meaning, reason, knowledge, observation and experience have a multitude of different uses, and none has a single absolute meaning to which priority must be granted. Since these terms are not self-defining, we employ their definitions according to the conceptual schemes of our choice. That is, we choose our definitions; they are not determined by objective reality. So, once again, proponents of the Madhyamaka view conclude that the question is meaningless: if the word ‘exist’ has no meaning independently of all conceptual frameworks, then it makes no sense to ask whether anything exists independently of all conceptual frameworks.

Along these lines, every now and then i pick up a paper that focuses on the idea that our language defines what exists for us. I'll have to dig it out, but i seem to remember reading a very good paper by David Loy several years ago on this topic. (I think it was Loy.) The point being, until something exists in our language, until we have a word for it, it doesn't exist.

Which goes back to a story i've seen in two separate places now (but at the gut level question its veracity) about early meetings between Spanish explorers and the native inhabitants of what has come to be know as South America. Before the explorers first arrived, the native's had never seen nor even heard of a "ship." They had no concept of what that could be, it simply didn't exist in their mentality or their vocabulary. The explorers were met on the shore by the tribe's shaman and as they landed, he asked how they had gotten there. The explorers pointed out to the ships anchored further off the shore but the shaman couldn't see them. Because "ship" didn't exist as a concept for them it didn't exist materially either, and was, therefore, invisible. It was only after much effort that he was able to get the concept into his head, and with the new word "ship" offered by the explorers, slowly the ships came into view.

I know this is slightly off-topic as far as Wallace's comments are concerned but, between Wallace's quote and the other example, i find it fascinating how language so defines who we are. Few people, i think, take the time to stop and analyze how completely language affects every aspect of who we are. Not just what we think, but what we are, what we accept as relevant, what we accept as valid, what we accept as existent. Language truly does define who we are as a person, as a culture, as a civilization, and all the way up to what we are as homo sapiens.

Siggghhhhh.....

Woke up Tuesday morning to find that neither Firefox nor IE will connect to the internet anymore. I didn't install anything that i can back out of, and both worked fine when i went to bed on Monday — AND every other application on the computer still connects with no problems; including Thunderbird, FileZilla, the Sony Reader app that connects to the Sony Reader Store, various program "update" functions, etcetera. It seems limited only to the browsers and http traffic. :-(

Computers, can't live without them, but can't help but hate them sometimes. So, until i figure out what to do, it looks like i'm back to books and only books for my entertainment. I suppose it could be worse, spending the day in my library is certainly no punishment, and coming to the public library every few days (i'm there now) gets me out of the house and gives me some exercise.

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Edited later at night: Have finally narrowed it down to the Web Shield component of Avast! Free Antivirus. As long as that's not running all is well; turn in on and both browsers stop talking to the 'net. Still have no idea why it suddenly decided to start causing problems after working without a problem for over 5 months. I uninstalled & reinstalled Comodo Firewall and Avast! Free Antivirus, but the problem hasn't changed. Interesting.....