The Power of an Open Question - Deep Contentment September 2, 2010
Posted by Philip Ryan in : Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism , add a comment
The way we know things depends upon the mind, nothing more. Most of us have moments of deep contentment when we don’t feel a need to alter, express, run from, or invest some special meaning in our experience in any way. Deep contentment shows us that, at least momentarily, our habit of cherishing and protecting ourselves from what we call “other” has subsided. In moments like these, we have stopped objectifying things. We can let things be. And when the mind rests at ease in this way, it accommodates everything, like space.
- Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, The Power of an Open Question
Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel’s Tricycle Retreat starts a week from today on Tricycle.com! Join the Tricycle Community to enjoy the retreat and get her book, The Power of an Open Question, at 30% off.
[Image: DCSL]
Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel Talk and Reading in New York City
Posted by Philip Ryan in : Books, Buddhism, Buddhist Teachings, Events, Tibetan Buddhism , add a commentIn the first of four talks for her Tricycle Retreat, Elizabeth says that standing on a street corner in Manhattan, she sees as many people in a moment as she might see in six months at home in Colorado. Well, lucky New Yorkers, she’s heading back your way! tricycle is proud to be the media sponsor of this event:
Sunday, September 26th
Threshold 521 West 26th Street 2nd floor
Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel - Public Talk “Finding Our Way to True Practice”
2 - 5 pm (2-2:30 is meditation)
$20
Followed by a reading from her new book, The Power of An Open Question at
6:30 PM. Book signing to follow. Free and open to the public. Refreshments
will be served.
Www.thepowerofanopenquestion.com
5 Minutes to Enlightenment
Posted by Philip Ryan in : Buddhism, Meditation , 1 comment so farKenneth Folk offers this five-minute journey to enlightenment:
How to Get Enlightened
What would I say if I had just five minutes to give comprehensive instructions for awakening?
You are unenlightened to the extent that you are embedded in your experience. You think that your experience is you. You must dis-embed. Do that by taking each aspect of experience as object (looking at it and recognizing it) in a systematic way. Then, surrender entirely.
Do these practices, exactly as written:
First Gear:
1) Objectify body sensations. If you can name them, you aren’t embedded there. Notice sensations and note to yourself: “Pressure, tightness, tension, release, coolness, warmth, softness, hardness, tingling, itching, burning, stinging, pulsing, throbbing.” If I am looking at something it is not “I”.
Sweetcake Enso Art Exhibit
Posted by Philip Ryan in : Art, Buddhism, Zen , add a commentSweetcake Enso is putting on a traveling art exhibition. There’s a list of confirmed venue on the website. And Here’s the press release, with a cool piece by one of the participating artists, Max Gimblett. The first call for submissions ended September 1:
In American culture Zen is often represented by the Enso, a calligraphic circle, to the extent that the Enso can be regarded as a logo for a brand identity. However, the Enso is truly known for the singularity of the mark as an expression of both presentness and emptiness. Sweetcake Enso draws attention to the abstract circle as a symbol of presentness in daily life, and opens out the traditional calligraphy of the Enso to include the work of Buddhist artists that is thriving in the contemporary art context. Alongside of Zen Master Nonin Chowaney’s traditional calligraphy will be that of artists more internationally known in the contemporary art context, such as Sanford Biggers, Noah Fischer, and Max Gimblett. It will also include the work of local community artists, and is traveling from Zen center to Zen Center in order to showcase their work in the context of larger Buddhist community. There are currently five Zen Centers on the east coast that are participating in the exhibit: Empty Hand Zen Center, the Village Zendo, Brooklyn Zen Center, Zen Center of Syracuse, and the Rochester Zen Center; and two on the west, the Olympia Zen Center and the San Francisco Zen Center.
The Power of an Open Question: Fork in the Road September 1, 2010
Posted by Philip Ryan in : Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism , 3 comments
The purpose of practice is to habituate ourselves to openness. This means we need to understand reactive mind. How do we experience the difference between reacting and staying open?
At what point do we decide to go with the habitual tendencies of exaggeration and denial or try something new? Where is the fork in the road? We need to explore these two experiences: reacting… staying open… reacting… staying open… reacting… staying open again. We begin to see the difference. It’s a process of refinement. Our investigation cultivates a discerning intelligence and guides us in a positive direction.
We need to ask ourselves: “If our confusion finds its genesis in our habit of turning away from the open state, what would happen if we habituated ourselves to staying open?” Surprise: another koan. - Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, The Power of an Open Question
Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel’s Tricycle Retreat starts September 6th on Tricycle.com! Join the Tricycle Community to enjoy the retreat and get her book, The Power of an Open Question, at 30% off.
[Image: whatknot]
Buddhism’s crumbling past
Posted by James Shaheen in : Art, Buddhism, History, Science , 3 comments
Not to be an alarmist, but preserving Buddhism’s past is an increasingly challenging endeavor. And while the truth of impermanence is fundamental to the Buddhist teachiings, no one said it’s easy. Bamiyan was a heartbreaker, and recent news that the Chinese may blow up the ancient ruins of a newly discovered monastery in order to mine for copper raised another alarm. Now, an SOS to Unesco from Buddhist Art News:
TAXILA, Aug 28: The recent rains have caused severe damage to scores of priceless stucco sculptures of the Buddhist period (4–5th century AD) at Taxila valley’s Mohra Moradu Stupa and Monastery which could have been saved had the archaeology department taken necessary steps to protect them.
This site is among the three most important of Taxila’s 18 Buddhist remains containing a rich collection of stucco sculptures and figures of Buddha which were still intact in the cellars of the monastery before the torrential rains.
The Mohra Moradu Monastery is located in a small valley between the ancient city of Sirkap and Jaulian, the site of the famous Buddhist University.
The site was savaged by treasurehunters who split apart the main stupa in the hope of finding gold inside. However the lower portion of the stupa buried under the ground remained protected as the vandals could not reach there and was found in good condition when the site was excavated by John Marshall in early 20th century. The stupa is famous for the many bas-reliefs of Buddha that adorn its base. The monastic cells around the stupa though badly crumbled yielded a treasure of stone stupas.
Now Mother Nature is taking her turn at finishing the job, and she tends to be more thorough than thieves and White Huns. It could have been avoided, though, the article complains, if the ruins had been properly protected. There’s still time, and so Unesco has received a distress call.
Take a look at the article here.
The Karmapa on the Environment
Posted by Monty McKeever in : Buddhism, Environment, Mindfulness, Tibetan Buddhism , 1 comment so farI recently came across this interview in the Asia Sentinel with Ogyen Trinley Dorje, one of the two young lamas recognized as the 17th Karmapa. It is a great interview and I recommend reading the whole thing, but this passage in particular jumped out at me.
The distance between humans and the environment is becoming wider and wider and likewise, we are bringing more and more harm to the environment by using it indiscriminately. Actually, before using the environment, we should think; it is very important to think of the consequences of indiscriminate destruction of the environment. Lack of mindfulness is creating a lot of problems.
Therefore, it is very important to be mindful of what we are using now and from where those resources come from. For example, sweet cheeps of birds and lush green forests are beauties; they are not something that we have created; rather those are naturally created beauties. However, if we cut down forests and harm animals, we are depriving ourselves of the natural beauties we enjoy; it is as if we are destroying the very sounds, smells and good tastes that we enjoy. Therefore, it is very important to be mindful.
Read the complete interview here.
Image courtesy of the Asia Sentinel
David Loy at the Tricycle Book Club
Posted by Sam Mowe in : Books, Buddhism, Events, Tricycle Community , add a comment
Join us Monday, September 20 at the Tricycle Book Club for the discussion of David Loy’s The World is Made of Stories. In this small book about big ideas, Loy attempts to tell the story of stories by engaging in a playful, energetic dialogue with wisdom quotations from a wide variety of sources. Everything that we know, Loy contends, we know from stories. He writes: “We play at the meaning of life by telling different stories.”
If stories hold this much power, and we’re all storytellers (Loy also points out that to not tell a story is to tell a story), then what can we take away from this understanding? What stories should we tell about ourselves and our world?
Come talk it out with us at the Tricycle Book Club. It’s free and easy to sign up. We’re 
looking forward to seeing you there.
Buy the book from Wisdom Publishing here.
David Loy is a frequent Tricycle contributor. His previous books include The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory and The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons. He is the Besl Professor of Ethics/Religion and Society at Xavier University in Cincinnati.
Off the grid, into the mind
Posted by Rachel Hiles in : Buddhism, Meditation, Mindfulness, Vipassana , 1 comment so far
In today’s New York Times, Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, describes his experience returning to technology after a week-long Buddhist meditation retreat at Insight Meditation Society (IMS). Having spent his time at IMS “unplugged” from technology—Wright spent five hours of sitting meditation and five hours of walking meditaiton each day—upon returning home he had to confront his email, smart phone, and the seduction of the 24-hour news cycle. Wright describes the wave of complicated emotions that befell him after falling into the trap of clicking on a link to a video of Paris Hilton’s recent arrest and then succumbing to his “techno-lust”—online window shopping for a new smart phone (though he admits that he already has an iPhone):
So there you go: covetousness, schadenfreude, anxiety, dread, and on and on. It’s the frequent fruitlessness of such feelings that the Buddha is said to have pondered after he unplugged from the social grid of his day — that is, the people he lived around — and wandered off to reckon with the human predicament. Maybe his time off the grid gave him enough critical distance from these emotions to discover his formula for liberation from them. In any event, it’s because the underlying emotions haven’t changed, and because the grid conveys and elicits them with such power, that his formula holds appeal for many people even, and perhaps especially, today.
Personally, I’m a fan of the formula, or at least of the version of it I’ve seen on modern American meditation retreats. If this column hasn’t featured lush praise for it, that’s partly because I’ve already written rapturously — a year ago, on this very Web site — about a previous retreat. But it’s also because I don’t want to oversell the program. The serenity tends to fade once you plug back into the grid. Sustaining even modest mindfulness in the modern world is a challenge.
For Wright, and many others, meditation retreats offer a valuable window into the world of the unplugged mind, but sustaining the mindfulness cultivated on the retreat becomes nearly impossible when he plugs back in. Nevertheless, as Wright says, “a week of silent meditation can help highlight how technology keeps us in its grip, and what some of the costs of our ongoing surrender are.”
For more from Robert Wright, read “Darwin and the Buddha,” Tricycle’s 2003 interview with the author, in which he discusses whether or not compassion makes evolutionary sense and how cultural evolution can counter the drives of biological evolution. Read Wright’s full Times opinion piece here.
Image: papergoddess.typepad.com
Daily Dharma: The Presence of the Present
Posted by Philip Ryan in : Buddhism, Science, Zen , add a commentTime can only disclose or unfold itself in our “now,” and as it does, all of time and all the world unfolds too. They cannot be separated. We stand in the center of what Dogen calls “arraying ourselves” as simultaneous observers, participants, and creators. Fields, grass, flowers, and wind always appear in the “now” that is ever one and ever renewing. Dogen has a word for this unity: being-time, or uji. To be is to be time. “As the time right now is all there is,” Dogen writes, “each being-time is without exception entire time.” In the context of Dogen and, perhaps, much of Buddhist understanding, the presence of the present is the only time you have.
- Adam Frank, “Time & Again“
Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel’s Tricycle Retreat starts in five days on Tricycle.com! Join the Tricycle Community to enjoy the retreat and get her book at 30% off.