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Killing the Buddha Reloaded
I happened to click over to Killing the Buddha today and noticed they've more or less relaunched in a new bloggy way. Part of the blogization of the world, I guess. In ten years there will be no more jobs, no more people nor wars nor car accidents nor even credit card debt -- everything will just be blogs. Well, there may still be credit card debt floating around.
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Collateral Damage?
Human Rights Watch says that 89% -- or 2,196 -- of the people killed by the "separatists" and "insurgents" in southern Thailand since January 2004 are civilians. They are careful to say separatist and not use the "T" word -- a good thing, since the word's overuse by the current junta in Washington has rendered it essentially meaningless. Oh, I guess there's two "T" words -- terrorist/m and torture. The obfuscated meaning of both is part of the shining legacy of the Department of Justice under Bush 2.
What does it mean when nearly 90% of a separatist or insurgent group's victims are civilians? I guess I'm naive. I guess I just don't understand modern asymmetrical warfare.
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Tibet: Open for Business
Tourists, rejoice! Sure, you may have to wait all day in the summer heat to get tickets to the Potala Palace, but now Tibet is open in the winter too! No more long lines! No more hot dusty streets! Just cool, refreshing ice and snow.
Beijing is working Tibet into the Olympics, starting with the torch on Everest. But more generally they are planning to transform Tibet entirely, as they expect its quaint charm to be a tourist draw for Olympic visitors.
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Navel Gazers & Firebrands
Ajahn Punnadhammo asks: "Is there a doctrinal aspect of Buddhism that hinders action in the world?" In his most recent post, the Theravada monk goes on to offer an answer of his own:
Possibly. There is the underlying sense that this conditioned realm is inherently flawed and will always be so. However, there is also a very great emphasis on compassion for all beings caught in it. And there are plenty of scriptural references to the Buddha advising on how to live a comfortable and decent life within this world, and even commenting on what we would relate to as social or political questions.
The ajahn's post was inspired by Bhikkhu Bodhi's article appearing in the current issue of Buddhadharma, published by the Shambhala Sun, the Canadian bimonthly founded by the late Chogyam Trungpa Rincpoche.
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Fox News misses some big stories
Check out this screenshot of the Fox News website this evening. (Click the graphic to see it life-size.) I think they missed a big story concerning the attorney general, but I'm not sure.
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Bombs and Buddhists
Three bombs were discovered in Sri Lanka on Sunday, one of them in the town of Kandy along the route of a procession to honor the Buddha's Tooth Relic. The 10-day festival will go on regardless. Sri Lanka has lived with terrorism for a very long time, and the Temple housing the Tooth was damaged by a truck bomb in 1998.
Meanwhile, a Buddhist delegation arrived in Sri Lanka from another majority-Buddhist country involved in a civil war, Thailand. The fighting there is getting more violent. Visitors from Myanmar / Burma are also due in Sri Lanka.
Is it ironic that a Tooth Relic is held in a town called Kandy? Teeth are tough customers.
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Nepal Watch
If you're looking for info on Nepal you can't do much better than Mikel Dunham's blog. Frequent updates, in-depth articles, great photos, and even info for tourists planning to visit the country -- for Nepaloholics, this site has it all.
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Eat Your Goji Berries
A lot of Buddhists have become interested in yoga in recent years. Many meditators have expressed a need to "get in touch with their bodies," while others, not so interested, find enough in the Satipatthana Sutta to keep them going for a lifetime. If you are the stretching type, you might want to check out a few cautionary tales in yesterday's New York Times. A lech with a yoga mat may just get your leotard in a twist.
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Still Looking for the Ox under Sacred Mountains
I've always liked the Ten Oxherding Pictures, and I came across these beautiful ones recently, from an artist named Tim Jundo Williams (©2001) on pages belonging to the Boonville One Drop Zendo. This one is the first, Looking for the Ox. Click the picture to see more. The style reminds me of the paintings Tolkien did for the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Sad news of the Reverend Gyosei Handa, who died in a freak accident involving his rider-mower. Good for him, cutting his own grass. No work, no food.
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Painkillers, IPU, India - China - Japan - Burma
Many people live with chronic pain with no hope of relief. But others have apparently had better luck relieving their suffering. Some notes on Vicodin and that family of painkillers from the AP:
More than 200,000 pounds of codeine, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone and meperidine were purchased at retail stores during 2005, the most recent year represented in the data. That is enough to give more than 300 milligrams of painkillers to every person in America.
I don't really know how much 300 milligrams is in terms of painkillers per person, but it sounds like a lot. I think the average dose is around 5 or 10 milligrams? No word on whether Rush Limbaugh was included in the counting. If so that might explain why the figures skew so high.
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Newly comment-able: Buddhism butts heads with the status quo
When this blog started it received as its first visitors a rampaging horde of spambots -- this led to the restricted comment policy (only people with WordPress accounts could post) which led to the dearth of comments here, which bothered some people. Well, the gate is now lifted. Welcome, human commentors! Picture the armies of spambots doomed to troll the web eternally, looking for open doors. Are there 10 spambots for every human on the web? More?
More hot water for Buddhists from those pesky "environmentalists." This time it's in Dharamsala over synthetic prayer flags that strangle trees, melt, and otherwise flap about like the proverbial plastic bag in the tree branches. Really the people complaining are not those dratted environmentalists but the locals around Dharamsala.
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Jodo Shinshu, the Khampa Festival, and NRO
Interesting posts on D.T. Suzuki and Jodo Shinshu and Other-Power over at The Buddhist Nerd Haven, and a good article on China's (stage) management of Tibet courtesy of the New York Times.
Also, the National Review takes note of the controversy over making Buddhism the state religion in Thailand. Funny, the NR telling Thailand, a country with an active and virulent Muslim insurgency within its borders, to exercise patience and discretion in dealing with a terrorist threat. Physician, heal thyself.
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Two Takes on Thich Nhat Hanh
The current issues of two Buddhist publications contain articles about the eminent Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. The Shambhala Sun, founded by the pioneering Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (his son and heir, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, is now the publication's president), devotes sixteen pages to Nhat Hanh and features his photo on the cover. Inquiring Mind, “a journal of the vipassana community,” which this year celebrated its 20th anniversary, has an intriguing piece by Arnie Kotler, once Nhat Hanh’s editor, publisher, disciple, and assistant, that discusses the painful dissolution of their long and close relationship.
Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the most prominent Buddhist masters teaching in the West, so it is not startling that two Buddhist publications feature articles about him at roughly the same time.
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Buddhists vs. Environmentalists in New Jersey and the Kalinga War Revisited
Members of the Amitabha Buddhist Society, a Pure Land sect, released various fish, reptiles and other critters destined for dinner plates in New York's Chinatown into the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey this past Sunday. Well, someone told New Jersey and the state apparatus may be irked to the point of issuing a $1,000 fine. The Amitabha folks, many of them strict vegans, were doing their part to spare the animals some extreme suffering, but the state remembers those freaky walking snakehead fish (see pic, courtesy the U.S. Dept.
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Kindness
As pointed out by the Worst Horse, here's a cool article on Team Tibet, a group of protesters who attended 11 major league games in early August.
A depressing article on cage-free eggs: cage-free doesn't mean cruelty-free. The message of the article is, people in the egg industry think consumers looking for cage-free eggs are basically idiots -- but we're idiots who may be willing to pay more -- for a label that ultimately means little.
Cage-free: At some point we have to take people's words for things, even if by "people" we mean a corporation. Otherwise we'll all be hopelessly cynical. It's about meaningful standards -- "organic", "natural", etc. -- and holding companies and people to those standards.
Animal cruelty.
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Weekend Open Thread
A hundred birds brought flower offerings to Fa-yung in his cave on Niu-t'ou Mountain.
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Buddhists at War
Danny Fisher reminds us of Hiroshima, sixty-two years (and now two days) ago. What is there to say but to wish for peace and hope that all of us may be free from suffering?
Speaking of Buddhist chaplains, check out this and this. And, here's a review of a book by a Buddhist at Abu Ghraib. Tricycle ran an interview with another Buddhist at Abu Ghraib in our summer issue. [Unfortunately, the interview is behind a paywall.
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Stop Eating, You're Destroying the Planet
Put down that Chicken McNugget / carrot / wild mushroom. No matter what you're eating, no matter how healthy or environmentally-friendly it's supposed to be, by eating it, you're destroying the planet. Nothing's safe, or sacred. "Food miles fly to top of consumer worry list," screams one headline (of course, that's in England, where with the whole foot-and-mouth thing they have to be more mindful of their food than Americans do.) Well, hold everything, food miles mean nothing, says some crank in the New York Times.
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We're all on the spectrum
A very interesting online test here for Asperger's Syndrome that got me thinking. It seems that more and more we learn (or, if you prefer, are told by so-called experts) that things like autism and pervasive developmental disorder are spectrum disorders, and that sexuality is a spectrum between the two poles of purely heterosexual and purely homosexual. Some would even say that gender itself is a spectrum between male and female, and few or none of us are 100% one or the other. Is this merely soft relativism or something grander, like transcending duality?
- Philip Ryan, Webmaster
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Buddhists Blown Up in Thailand and a Blow-up Buddha in New York
The title of this post is very dark, but that's just because this situation in Thailand could use more attention. Here are some brief notes from around the infobahn:
The powers that be in Gujarat have decided that Buddhism and Jainism are not merely branches of Hinduism. This ruling happened because of the recent and continuing conversions of dalits. The nationalist Hindu government wanted to say that the conversions weren't actually conversions. But maybe the law saying that Buddhism didn't exist would paradoxically protect Buddhists from persecution? Funny how India keeps trying to swallow up its problem child.
“If Buddhists are treated as part of Hinduism, then all its followers in China, Japan and much of South-East Asia become Hindus,” said Girish Patel, a noted social activist.
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