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"Dharma Family Values" by Clark Strand, and Progressive Buddhism
It seems like Clark Strand's piece "Dharma Family Values" in the latest Tricycle has struck a chord. It was written about (and Strand was interviewed) in Religionwriter.com and this was noticed in On Faith, an online conversation on -- you guessed it -- faith put out by Newsweek and the Washington Post. Strand's piece was also noticed by a blogger from the Courier-Journal out of Louisville, and the blog Thoughts Chase Thoughts.
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Healing Rage, Ask the Next President, and Breathing Space
Ruth King, author of the excellent new book Healing Rage, will be speaking at the New York Insight Meditation Center this Friday, September 28 (7–9:30pm, fee: $20) and Saturday, September 29 (10am–5pm, $40.) Register online for the Friday or Saturday session.
Also, check out Ask the Next President -- You can submit questions and rate other people's questions, then the "winning" questions will be sent to our fine presidential aspirants.
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Ayn Rand, Austrian Students, and the Vatican
Did you know that Ayn Rand was Buddhist? (Or that Alan Greenspan was an Objectivist? Yeesh.)
Rand’s idea of “the virtue of selfishness,” Ms. Moore said, “is a harsh phrase for the Buddhist idea that you have to take care of yourself.”
Ms. Moore is "Darla Moore, vice president of the private investment firm Rainwater Inc." People keep buying Ayn Rand's books and, according to this article, she keeps winning the hearts and minds of CEO's and corporate climbers to this day.
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Change Your Mind Day 2007 and more on Burma
Tricycle's virtual Change Your Mind Day 2007 is tomorrow, September 15th, 2007.
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Burmese Monks Demand Apology from Junta
Monks in Burma are continuing to stir the pot. Now they're demanding an apology from the junta running the country for continued violence during the democratic protests, and demanding the release of political prisoners, including the most famous, Aung San Suu Kyi. The junta generally treads lightly around the monks in this very Buddhist country (despite violence against demonstrating monks last week, which lead to the monks' taking hostages for a day,) but have cut off phone service in their opposition's headquarters.
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Good company
Did you know there are only three countries in the world that have not officially adopted the metric system? They are (drumroll) the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar. I don't know what Liberia's excuse is. More on Myanmar later. (Britain and Ireland and probably many other countries are part-time metric users.) I love the odd globes on that first link. The one on this page represents our fearless Leader's view of the world, by the way. (Just don't go quizzing him on the state capitals!
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The Camden 28
Just saw a great documentary on PBS, The Camden 28, about activism, Vietnam, and the draft, all against the sad backdrop of Camden, New Jersey, where some of the worst race riots in American history took place in the summer of 1971. (Also interesting stuff about the Catholic Left.)
The draft really did a lot to mobilize anti-war feeling. Government jackbootism was much more blatant in that era -- now we have subtler means of control, and the current conflicts are designed to be more palatable and easier to bear / ignore for the American people as a whole.
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Monasteries Under Surveillance, Freedom from Fear
The military junta in Myanmar is keeping Buddhist monasteries under surveillance because monks have been rippin' it up right under the dictatorship's noses over the past few weeks. And it seems the letter from Hollywood glitterati to the U.N. Sec-Gen has yielded fruit:
At U.N. headquarters in New York, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stepped up his pressure on Myanmar's military leaders, saying he was committed to working toward the "full democratization" of the country.
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Four Legs Good
Painter Gregg Chadwick -- see his painting "The Sound of Bells" (40" x 30" oil on linen 2005) at right -- has a show at the Arts Club of Washington (DC) running until September 29th. Press release here. Chadwick is a friend of our friend The Worst Horse.
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Fragments of News
Here's a post on Buddhism and Psychology found accidentally on Digg. (Brains of meditators were compared with typical brains and interesting things were found, etc.) And here's a German theologian talking about why Germans like Buddhism more than they like Christianity:
Buddhism, in the West, is perceived as being free from dogmas, as a religion without many rules. It is a religion that's turned to the inside and that emphasizes meditation.
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Magic Kingdom
The Atlantic Monthly has a web-only slideshow of photos from Bhutan. These pictures accompany an article that seems to be only available to subscribers. The pictures are very cool and beautiful, but the whenever a country and culture is presented as so exotic, as such a spectacle, it gets a little condescending and weird. But this is interesting to people like me and probably you who have never been to Bhutan, and of course most of us will never get all the way to the valley of the Blue Moon. People with the time and money can go and gawk if they want, and bore us with their photos and stories when they get back.
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L.A. Buddha Project
Long-Bin Chen has a way cool exhibit of "Reading Sculptures" -- sculptures made out of old reading material -- at the Frank Pictures Gallery in Santa Monica. Not exactly sure what went into the Buddha head at right.
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Burmese Monks Fight the Power
Buddhist monks are seriously involved in the protests in Burma. They recently went as far as holding twenty hostages, at least 15 of whom were "mainly local and security officials" for a day. Plus Monks vs. the Military, and Buddhist Monks trash a (local militia leader's) shop.
Staying Southeast Asia, more on the proposal to make Buddhism the state religion of Thailand.
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It Was, Then It Wasn't
I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying near Savatthi in Jeta's grove, Anathapindika's monastery. Now at that time the Blessed One sat reflecting on the various evil, unskillful qualities that had been abandoned [in him] and on the various skillful qualities that had gone to the culmination of their development. Then as he realized the various evil, unskillful qualities that had been abandoned [in him] and the various skillful qualities that had gone to the culmination of their development, he on that occasion exclaimed:
Before, it was, then it wasn't.
Before, it wasn't, then it was.
It wasn't, won't be
& now isn't to be found.
[Udana (Exclamations) VI.3, from Handful of Leaves 4, An Anthology from the Khuddaka Nikaya, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, © 2003]
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Gore and the Buddhist Monastery
Read the Vanity Fair article "Going After Gore" today to be reminded of the whole fundraising debacle the Veep had involving Buddhists. This Washington Post article from 1999 (by the fair and balanced Ceci Connolly) gleefully pictures Gore "grubbing for dollars inside a monastery." These days Hillary Clinton has fundraising scandals of her own, but the one with Gore and the Buddhists (the exotic religion carries the whiff of foreign money and therefore corruption that raises American hackles) had particularly long legs. It didn't lose him the election, but what a different world we'd live in if he'd won.
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Change Your Mind Day 2007 and the Village Zendo
A fun day today as (Tricycle Associate Publisher) Allison Steinberg and I trooped over to Village Zendo here in Manhattan to film Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara for Change Your Mind Day 2007. That's her over to the right. Thanks for your help, roshi! Village Zendo is housed in a very beautiful space on lower Broadway, but the sangha's tenancy there is unfortunately threatened by steadily rising commercial real estate prices.
This year, Tricycle won't be hosting a day of meditation in Central Park as we've done in years past, but will instead be hosting CYMD online.
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Pagodas over Pungo
A victory for the International Campaign for Tibet: Congress passed a resolution allowing them to host a ceremony honoring the Dalai Lama on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on October 17th, 2007. That same day in the rotunda Congress will also give the DL the "highest civilian honor" Congress can give (the Congressional Medal of Freedom?) It's actually pretty amazing. Don't worry, we'll hear from China on this one.
Some Buddhist monks are running into trouble from neighbors in Pungo, Virginia who want to keep their neighborhood rural. Three monks want to live in the house and hold services there.
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Where's Meng?
Thanks to our friend Tom Armstrong of Thoughts Chase Thoughts for pointing us to a New York Times piece on Google engineer Tan Chade-Meng, a founding father of Buddhism online with the venerable site "What do you think, my friend?" (Tom points out that the NYT piece makes no mention of Mr. Tan's ur-Buddhist webwork.) Instead, the article focuses on pictures of the Google engineer with celebrities visiting the Google campus.
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Burned any good books lately?
The Tibet Connection, and English-language radio show, airs the last Friday of each month from Los Angeles, but you can also stream it live at kpfk.org. You can listen to the most recent show (August 31, 2007, featuring Robert Thurman, among others) here. The next show will be September 28th at 2 pm Pacific time.
Banned Book Week is September 29-October 6, 2007. Learn more about it from the American Library Association.
Olympic News: Richard Gere calls for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
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