wake up

Posted on February 17, 2013 by tiramit

There’s a book by Jack Kerouac titled ‘Wake Up’, the story of the Buddha in the style of the ‘beat’ way. I used to have it on my bookshelf in the house in East Anglia and one day the electrician came to the house to fix some circuits and his young assistant picked up the book; a young guy, long hair sticking out, wearing shorts and running shoes, tattooed legs, said he’d heard of the Buddha and also Kerouac and that was pretty cool. So we had a little discussion about this. Later on I noticed the tattoo on his leg, there was something familiar about the flowing calligraphic style and then I remembered: Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ in Tibetan script. I asked him about it and he was pleased that I’d noticed it; said he got it recently, didn’t know much about what it was, really, just looked good. And I told him, it was nice, and we looked at it for a while; him spinning his leg around so I could read it all, leg hairs and the indigo coloured inks. I said that I’d read somewhere this six syllable statement contains the essence of the entire teaching of the Buddha, according to Tibetan tradition. ‘Cool,’ he says. There it was, the innate consciousness in nature, activated by mysterious Sanskrit sound frequencies in harmonic resonance, tattooed on the leg of an electrician’s assistant in East Anglia.

Kerouac begins with the statement: ‘Buddha means the awakened one.’ Buddhism is the wake-up call; it’s built-in – comes with the software. There’s the quality of being aware; receptive to the whole thing. The sensation of sunlight on my skin, of how the body senses the outer world, and everything I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel and think. The mental faculty senses the larger consciousness, looking to see what that might be. It’s not the thoughts, the thinking process, or the identity of ‘me’ engaging with this. It’s anatta, what’s outside of all of that; an awareness that includes everything. And I can find it coming out through all the layers created by the mind. Just trying to understand what it takes to see what that sort of thing could be.

This holds my attention in a particular kind of way. It’s a kind of alertness, an ongoing investigation into the present moment and everything about the sensory function and the cognition of it is there too. It’s triggered by a simple curiosity: what is this? And the attitude of careful listening, I am the awareness inside of the object outside, awareness is both and everywhere is here, everything is this; as far as the eye can see.

‘Thus Tathagata, He-Who-Has-Attained-to-Suchness-of-Mind and sees no more definite conceptions of self, other selves, many divided selves, or one undivided universal self, to whom the world is no longer noticeable, except as a pitiful apparition, yet without arbitrary conception either of its existence or non-existence, as one thinks not to measure the substantiality of a dream but only to wake from it; thus Tathagata, piously composed and silent, radiant with glory, shedding light around, rose from under his Tree of Enlightenment, and with unmatched dignity advanced alone over the dreamlike earth as if surrounded by a crowd of followers, thinking, ‘To fulfill my ancient oath, to rescue all not yet delivered, I will follow out my ancient vow. Let those that have ears to hear master the noble path of salvation.’[Jack Kerouac, ‘Wake Up,’ 1955]

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Image (upper): detail from a photo by Louk Vreeswijk (lower): Om Mani Padme Hum, in Tibetan script

metta/loving-kindness

Posted on February 14, 2013 by tiramit

Valentine’s Day 2012: ‘All you need is love, love, love is all you need…’ One very small problem about love is that if you love this person, you can’t love that other person as much. So you have to manage all the likes, dislikes and unlikes; friend and ‘unfriend’ too. The stormy weather of loving one thing completely and other things not at all – but how can we love everything? The practice of mettā holds all beings in loving-kindness; all phenomena, all sentient beings, we contemplate in terms of loving-kindness. Okay but it’s not easy to love everything… yep, some things aren’t very lovable; lovability potential: zero. No matter how much I try, I can’t love that thing; sorry, no, I can’t do it. But what I can do is have mettā for the feeling that I can’t do it; I can have loving-kindness for my resistance to loving the unloved. Being open to all conditioned experience with an attitude of kindness, and accepting things as they are; this is the practice of mettā.

The aversion I experience is not so much about the unloved thing itself, it’s about ‘me’ struggling to accept the reality of it being there. Mettā is about non-aversion, if I have aversion for the unloved, it just exacerbates the situation. Allow it in to conscious awareness, the unlovedness, let it be there and just know this feeling as it is now. Okay, so I leap into a state of aversion as soon as I open up to it like that. But I have mettā for that state too. I can come back later, try again; I can be patient with this condition as it is right now in this present moment. Having mettā means allowing it to be. I’m not interacting with it, I’m just willing to be with it. It’s the same as everything else, its nature is impermanent, it changes, breaks down, crumbles into pieces and it’s gone. I’m not looking for the natural cessation of it, though, that’s not the goal. I’m just allowing it to be as it is, accepting that and, bit by bit, there’s a release of the tension caused by ‘me’ resisting the presence of the unloved. That’s the point of the exercise.

The effort to get away from the reality of the unloved, restimulates the discomfort and negative emotion starts building up again. Even so, there’ll be times when it’s possible to just receive the experience without resisting it. I see then, this is the way to go; loving the unloved. Over time, things begin to change, there’s a willingness to let everything be as it is, pleasant feelings and unpleasant feelings. I can have mettā for all the negativity locked away inside, opening the door, letting it all go; freedom! The heart isn’t heavy with dislike, blame and resentment. A sense of lightness and well-being.

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‘By reminding ourselves to have metta for the feelings we experience – not thinking about them or analysing them but going to the place in the body itself, to the mental quality, really embracing that – really being willing to feel those particular emotions, they become bearable. By changing our attitude to one of acceptance rather than of rejection, to interest, rather than just wanting to get rid of them, we find that they are things we can tolerate. Then they cease on their own, for all conditions are impermanent.’ [‘Universal Loving Kindness‘ by Ajahn Sumedho, Forest Sangha Newsletter, October 1997, Number 42]

– g r a t i t u d e –

being here

Posted on February 11, 2013 by tiramit

New Delhi: This is the 100th post! I feel like I should celebrate, I’m a blogger centenarian! But still a youngster, I think. Many bloggers are much older than me. So, what’s going on here? This blog is about the Buddha’s teachings, Advaita Vedanta, non-duality. I went public on July 6th, 2012 and I’ve been putting up new posts every three days, mostly, since that time. Now it’s ‘The One Hundredth’, and I was going to use that title for this post but it’s been used already – the 100th in the TV series: ‘Friends.’ The dhammafootsteps blog is, of course, about reaching out to friends, but the discussion is about just being ‘here.’ We’re all here in our various states of being, in different parts of the world; in different time zones and we’re all individually contemplating our own experience of being ‘here.’ Blogging is a good medium for this kind of thing because, just being ‘here’ is what everybody is talking about or describing, one way or another – isn’t it?

Here’s something from: Beyond The Dream: ‘…the awareness that looked out of our eyes as a five year old is the awareness that’s looking out of our eyes now.’ When I read that sentence it had a curious effect; there was an instant understanding of what being ‘here’ means. Then the next thought was, what is ‘the awareness’? And it’s a good question, that one, you can just go on asking it…. It’s like trying to understand sati-sampajañña, clear comprehension; what does that mean? And maybe I’m off somewhere searching for the meaning of clear comprehension, overlooking the fact that all the confusion is still there in my head. So, I’ll never find clear comprehension that way, because every time I think I’ve found it, the confusion just jumps up in its place. Eventually I realize clear comprehension means understanding the confusion. It has to be that way; clear comprehension of the confusion, and not some kind of desired state of clarity that doesn’t exist. The confusion is, I can’t see reality because I’m too engaged with the idea of it.

In the West we suffer from the creator-god condition; God made the world so the world and God are two separate things. I see the world from some impossible place outside of it; I’m on shaky ground here, in control mode, there’s the paranoia of thinking I can’t let it go and the fear of having to hold on indefinitely. All the clutter and stuff and mental goings-on and stumbling over all the indistinct, half-seen, misunderstood truths – believing that this is what life is about. Not able to see that it just doesn’t matter what kind of story is showing on the screen, it’s all fiction, created by the mind, arising and ceasing, dependent on causes and conditions and the karmic outcome of past events.

The mind doesn’t create awareness, mind is contained in the awareness. It’s something like, awareness is there, I just think I can’t see it. Thinking I can’t see it, is another mind moment that exists temporarily in the awareness. Being here is about getting to know everything there is to know about what that means….

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somewhere over the rainbow

Posted on February 5, 2013 by tiramit

Bangkok-Delhi flight: Something happens to interrupt the dream… it wakes me up and I remember I’m on the plane. It’s a window seat, clouds outside and a huge horizon – the curvature of the earth. Here in the confines of economy class, the large man next to me wears a short-sleeved shirt and has hairy arms, the passenger in front has extended his seat all the way back, and it’s like his head is in my lap. I feel I’m part of the South Asian population already. Stewardess announcement: ‘raydee and gentermens…’ Thai, mispronunciation of the L and R consonant and a plurality problem, ‘.. ensure window shades are up, armrest is down, fold away table up, and chair forward… If I think too much about it, I get lost with the instructions. ‘And this concludes our fright service…’ Reminds me of a flight to Jakarta once; and the last part of the stewardess announcement: ‘… and the penalty for dlug tlafficking is death, thank you.’

The final part of the Woody Allen movie I was watching before I went to sleep is still showing on the screens. I don’t have the sound plugged in, just looking at the actors fumbling around like serious, grown-up children. The ‘I’ metaphor is an image projected on a screen; reassuring in the midst of our existential anxiety. Consciousness plays the game of hide-and-seek, concealment and obscuring – if consciousness is revealing itself, it means it’s also obscuring itself and things appear to be what they are not. Woody Allen has a cartoon face, he was born with it, that was/is his destiny. I plug-in the sound to see what it’s about – the idleness of it is immense, samsara, conversations of no consequence unravel here during the time it takes from departure point A, to arrival point B at the speed of 600 miles per hour.

Watching other people looking around, heads spinning left and right, down, up, coordinating body movements; going along the aisles and coming back to their seat, holding on to chair backs as they go, simply occupied with the physicality of being in the limited interior of this aircraft, mesmerized by the phenomenon of individuality. There’s not anything beyond the mind’s perception of itself as the leading actor in this movie; the assumption is that, one way or another, everything coming through the sense gates and into the mind is about ‘me.’

‘Infinite being playing the game of limited being. The limited being is a construct we’ve taken on; it’s like this because the infinite being that we are isn’t bothered by limitations and permits everything with infinite love…’ [David Bingham, Conscious TV]

Plane tilts over and makes a left-hand turn. Sunlight comes in through the cabin windows on the right side and sweeps around the interior as the plane changes direction, circles around and goes into descent. It’s as if it were a flying house, spinning around on its axis (We’re not in Kansas anymore, says Dorothy to Toto. We must be somewhere over the rainbow.’) Audio switched on; music for arriving. Slow calm triumphant music has a kind of congratulatory sound; the final approach; our journey’s end. And the digital map of the world shown on the monitor has the illuminated flight path BKK/DEL as a diagonal line about 30 degrees North East with the small icon of the plane now circling over New Delhi – population 16 million, including rural/urban seasonal migrants. A few moments later: BUMP BUMP wheels touch down on runway. Population increased by one planeload.

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‘I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens’ [Woody Allen]

backstory

Posted on January 27, 2013 by tiramit

Chiang Mai: Skype call from P in the North of Scotland, walking through a shopping mall interior, holding up his phone camera in front of him and I’m able to enter into a view of the world at this moment, about 5500 miles away. It feels like I’m really there; a chromium steel, tiled and glass environment with Starbucks and everything is recognizably ‘the mall’. People wearing scarves and hats, thick clothing – it’s below freezing outside that building. Light from the mall windows fading out to zero white, pixelated edges of electric blue and turquoise suggests air so cold it’s like an ice-cream headache, chilled nasal passageways and cranial cavities. I’m thinking of ice-rinks, peppermint and menthol. Words come out with vigour in great gusts of steamy vapour.

I lived there in a former life – long ago and far away. The sharp clear air, constant wind, and winter daylight lasts only a few hours; it was a world without colour. Cold, wet, windy and the mind is saying: ‘No, I don’t like this. I want sunshine, I want warmth,’ the samsara of wanting it to be different from how it is. And eyes looking through the gap between hat and scarf, out into the world but inwardly removed and seeing the sunshine in some fictional landscape created in the mind. I didn’t know anything about the Buddhist perspective on Suffering, dukkha nirodho ariya sacca, at that time, just ‘driven’ by a sadly dysfunctional family and nameless hunger that arises from the feeling that there has to be something better than this.

So, one thing led to another, and it’s a long story, but eventually I discovered it’s not ‘me’, it’s just the way it is. I can have loving-kindness, mettā, for the created ‘me’ and lighten up about that. I don’t get seriously into it any more, now there’s that distance from my constructed identity. It’s been with me all those years, wow, like something historical: ‘This is the house that Jack built.’ And now I’m here in South East Asia; not too hot at this time of year, warm like a Mediterranean summer; rubber slippers, shorts and a T-shirt. The quality of light is amazing, colours of things are outstanding, as if lit from within – a Disney cartoon – papaya fruit is an amazing fluorescent, magic-marker orange; green trees against blue skies and the whole thing feels like it’s been photo-shopped. The air is warm like a soft quilt cover wrapped around the shoulders, with no weight, so you feel this lightness – ‘Unbearable Lightness of Being ‘ by Milan Kundera, worth reading if only for the title.

But all this coming to an end very soon, less than a week to go before the time comes to go back to Delhi and the colder climatic conditions of the North. Not able to flop around in thin cotton clothing any longer… nope. This time next week I’ll be socked and shoed and trousered, and scarved and coated, hair-combed, passported and ticketed and transported to the North of India in a passenger jet, but that’s not happened yet so there’s time to reflect on that difference and get ready for the adjustment.

I’ve been living in other people’s countries for more than 30 years; met Jiab on the way. She still identifies with her Thai cultural context. I’ve nearly forgotten mine. I used to go back to the family home up there at the top of the world and most people couldn’t remember me; all the elders’ hair going grey, and greyer then white, Now I go there for funerals and people just don’t know me at all. I’m a foreigner there and a foreigner everywhere else. I’m more into the Thai world than any other culture – they see me as a kind of cultural hybrid.

There’s a shrine in Jiab’s family home; a structure of tiny ornate tables placed one on top of each other, in a hierarchy of size. The larger ones are at the bottom and smaller ones placed on top and even smaller ones placed on top of them. It’s built up to about five levels. An ascending, perspective effect as things recede above eye level with candles and an image of the Buddha on the topmost table. It’s the one where he’s protected by the hooded snake god Naga, extending Cobra neck hood and curved over the head of the Buddha forming a kind of umbrella (there was a rainstorm at the time of approaching enlightenment). Above that, framed on the wall, there’s a row of these faded old sepia photos of Jiab’s ancestors. There they all are, looking down at me. I feel their gaze because I’m not just a cultural hybrid in their eyes, I’m from a different planet too. I sometimes feel they need to look at me more carefully than they look at other visitors to the shrine. So I just let them do that, it’s a kindly gaze, without the burden of thought, comfortably dwelling in a state of wakefulness, and understanding things in their actuality.

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Photo (upper) Iceland wave, Peter H. Photo (lower) Chinese temple BangPah-in, Elaine H

how it seems (1)

Posted on January 25, 2013 by tiramit

I SEE THE WORLD through a built-in selection process that reflects and supports the default state of mind; it’s like fish cannot see the water they swim in; so obvious, yet… but I can get it to fit, more or less, according to my likes and dislikes and fall deeper into the dream. I make it into something good or bad or whatever and the fact that I can’t see it – well, it just does that. I call it reality. How I perceive the world is dependent on causes and conditions that were here before I was born; you could say it comes with the software. I think I’m an independent being not affected by anything or not affecting or influencing anything else. I can’t see this is a work of fiction and it’s all being monitored by the ongoing needs and requirements of an entity I created; a ‘self’ that has no real substance. I’m dismayed, of course, by how it all gets swept away in randomness; subject to the kamma, unknowingly created at some earlier time.

‘… It’s because of not understanding and not penetrating this Dhamma that this generation is like a tangled skein, a knotted ball of string, like matted rushes and reeds, and does not go beyond the cycle of the planes of deprivation, woe, and bad destinations.’ [Tanha Sutta: Craving” (AN 4.199)]

The outer world just rolls along, as it does, in all its diversity, and totally neutral. Whether there’s belief it’s this or that, makes no difference; it’s just how it seems. The devastating emptiness of it all means the population is driven to get and do and attain and protect and defend. It’s a battlefield. To avoid and deny, to have fear and anxiety and be controlled by authority and feel threatened with the flimsy nature of existence, although the absolute fragility anicca, is the beauty of it. But the population can’t see it like that. They are clutching at straws but don’t see it like that; don’t see they are maintained in an unknowingness of the world like penned animals are by the farmer, well intentioned though he may be, in order to cultivate a special kind of hunger, upadana tanha (clinging and craving) – and the economy depends on this. The greater the craving, the faster the turnover of stock and the Western style of God together with governments and the corporations are simply involved in farming the population.

I can understand why the Buddha was thinking the Dhamma was too subtle and there was no point in teaching it because no one would understand. I can see how, in those historical times of feudal hierarchy, it would have seemed impossible to create social change…. and is it any different now? It seems just as impossible for people to understand today. I wonder if I really fully understand it myself. I’m no different from other people, this is our shared suffering. But the Buddha changed his mind about it being too subtle. He said there is a way out and we can find it in the framework of the Four Noble Truths. The teaching has survived 2600 years. Understanding replaces misunderstanding; ignorance is pushed out. There’s a simple curiosity and this quiet state of at-ease knowingness….

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the conditioned realm

Posted on December 29, 2012 by tiramit

Chiang Mai Airport: Waiting in departures to board the delayed flight to Bangkok. Three flights leaving around the same time, very crowded and all seats near the gate are taken. It’s the peak tourist season, young Caucasians sprawled around on the floor, everywhere. Long legs, pointed elbows sticking out – This Is Our Way – a sea of brightly coloured T-shirts, shorts, rubber slippers. And no room in the small coffee shop either; a forest of exposed limbs, tattooed legs, bosoms, identity obscured behind dark glasses, headphones, peaked caps and hunched over iPhones and digital devices, sucking up drinks through a plastic straw and I’m thinking of the tubular proboscis of a large alien insectoid. This is how the Gap Year looks. Like they’re sensory-experience junkies, got to have that input by way of the sense gates ayatana – closed to the world and the thought of emptiness is a seriously bad dream.

They do have that intense look, though, that says they know the ego of the West is a self-sustaining concept running out of battery and most likely to fizzle out quite soon; you could say impermanence, annican there’s no substance to it, same with all things. There’s the Christian God of the West everyone is trying to distance themselves from; the one-and-only-God, elite club that disincludes two thirds of the world’s population because they’re not Christian. It’s like a right wing supremacist movement, same as the so-called Muslim extremist groups – spot the difference – pretty ugly; there’s a war and both sides pray to God to win. God gets confused and there’s another war, and another…. So they can’t be talking about God, the Ultimate Reality, what they’re talking about is one of the gods of the conditioned realm. The logic of this is inescapable – how could God be something that one religion has and another doesn’t have? But there’s a kind of nobody-at-home look on the faces of my Christian friends when it seems like I’m going to want to try to discuss this point further.

These young people are all ordinary, well-intentioned folk and, just on this level, doing what they believe is the right thing, believe in the naiivity; subject to their conditioning in the West, their peers, parents, school, government. Maybe they’ve come here as part of a response to the human wake-up call – the built-in awakening opportunity that exists in mystical religions, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and others. It’s there too in the postmodern world; deconstructing, breaking it all down until there’s absolutely nothing left and the wake-up call is activated. Some people wake up, but some just don’t wake up at all.

It gets complicated and that’s why the Buddha was saying life is difficult enough as it is so let’s not get engaged with the God concept, okay? Attachment to the idea of it becomes a desire in itself and that’s what’s causing the problem. Ultimate reality is so fragile and subtle you can never be absolutely sure you’re not still setting it up so you’re seeing it the way you want it to be, still in the conditioned realm and far from the Truth. The best thing to do is not call it anything, cultivate mindfulness, clear comprehension, discerning awareness and take care; see how that goes.…

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‘… the illusory world is through attachment. We think we all live in the same world as personalities, but every one of us lives in a world of our own creation. We have certain things in common but so much of our life is personal and unique to ourselves. That world we create is not the objective world we believe we’re living in, we’re living in a world of our own creation. That’s why it’s so difficult relating to each other, isn’t it? We’re coming from different worlds – you feel, sometimes, you’re living with a bunch of aliens!’ [Ajahn Sumedho, ‘In Awareness There is No Dukkha’]

Photo: Louk Vreeswijk

the end of the world

Posted on December 19, 2012 by tiramit

‘In my beginning is my end. In succession , houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,  are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place  is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.  Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,  old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth  which is already flesh, fur and faeces. Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.  Houses live and die: there is a time for building  and a time for living and for generation  and a time for the wind to break the loosened pane  and to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots  and to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.’ [T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, East Coker 1]

Delhi-Bangkok flight: The stewardess comes to my seat and asks me, would you like a hot towel sir? I say OK, thinking, do I need that too…? Altitude of 28,000 feet, travelling at 500 miles per hour; we must all be moving along here like extended strings of spaghetti in a streak of light. She takes one out with her little forceps from the small box she’s holding, drops it in my hands so I can catch it and it burns my fingers for a moment then becomes a cold and clammy thing with which to wipe the face and hands. Not the ‘hot-towel’ experience I thought it’d be and I notice in passing it’s like all other sensory experience, a bit of a let-down. The sensitivity of the mind is not held by the limitations of the body and I’m always looking for more than what there is. The mind continually searching beyond the present instance; using one thing as a springboard to get to the next, means that everything is driven on and on, and the present time is not here at all.

Consciousness, perception, and reality interact by way of the six sense doors: eye, ear, nose, tongue, feeling, and mind. The one that is accessible is the mind sense-door, leading to awareness of all the other senses, including the sense that it is self-aware; a cognitive functioning focussed on the sense of awareness. Everything falls away, leaving only the arising and ceasing of things. Then that falls away too and there is ‘the end of the world’. Beyond that, awareness continues – not dependent on conditions supporting awareness.

‘When no personal image is created… there is nothing to lose, a sense of gladness, uplift, joy and serenity.  With the cessation of such a death-bound frame of reference there is the living of the True life, the Holy life. [Ajahn Sucitto, from the Introduction to “The Way It Is”  by Ajahn Sumedho]

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“And what is the ending of the world? … Dependent on the intellect & mental qualities there arises intellect-consciousness. The meeting of the three is contact. From contact as a requisite condition comes feeling. From feeling as a requisite condition comes craving. Now, from the remainderless cessation & fading away of that very craving comes the cessation of clinging/sustenance. From the cessation of clinging/sustenance comes the cessation of becoming. From the cessation of becoming comes the cessation of birth. From the cessation of birth, then aging & death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair all cease. Such is the cessation of this entire mass of stress & suffering. This is the ending of the world.” [Loka Sutta: The World” (SN 12.44), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu]

More Than Enough

Posted on September 30, 2012 by tiramit

Mitt Romney’s 47% remark drew a lot of attention, perhaps revealing an uncharitable, grudging attitude but it does inevitably bring us around to seeing a quality we all possess: generosity of spirit. Generosity, as a mental, emotional letting go, means releasing the tenacity of holding on to things. Baggage, all that heavy stuff we burden ourselves with, is removed in one single act of generosity. What’s wrong with being generous; cultivating an inward disposition to give? A glad willingness to share what we have with others – why not? We have more than enough. Give it away. Ease the discomfort of being driven to fulfill that urge to ‘have’, a hunger created by always wanting more. All of it is gone when you’re generous.

Brainstorm the word ‘generosity’ and you come up with loving-kindness, compassion, empathy, well being, freedom. You find gratitude, grace, honour, motivation, encouragement. Generosity is everything. It’s nature is to share, recycle, circulate; it can only be given, never taken. With generosity we can accept, we can share, we can forgive. Generosity leads to wisdom – the truth is without bias. There is an understanding of things as they really are.

In Buddhism, generosity is seen as a way to counteract greed. It’s a way of helping others and a means of lessening the economic disparities in society. Generosity is part of Right View. The dhamma of generosity is a gift for all of society as we struggle for meaning in a world of dollars, logos, oil and military spectacle. The dhamma of giving is a disinfectant, a gunk dissolver, an antidiote for the monetary values, brand names that clutch at our hearts.

‘The complex American culture of healthy (that is, democratic) and unhealthy (worship of profit) elements…. Even middle-class Americans, rich by the standards of most of the worlds people, spend much of their money on indulgences, entertainment and addictions.’ [Practising Generosity in a Consumer World]

The cultivation of generosity directly debilitates greed and hate, while facilitating that pliancy of mind that allows for the eradication of delusion. In Buddhist countries, babies are taught when they are about six months old to put food into the monk’s alms-bowl. The whole family applauds as the sticky rice drops from that little hand into the monk’s bowl. The kid gets the idea early on: when stuff leaves your hand, you feel happy. It feels good to give. Everything the Buddhist monk receives is a gift, an offering. Ajahn Amaro describes it in this way: ‘Our bodies are fueled by the food that is offered to us. In fact, scientists say that all the cells of the body are replaced every seven years, so any of us who has been ordained for that long now has a body that is completely donated. If it were not for the accumulated kindnesses, efforts, and good will of countless hundreds and thousands of people, this body would not be able to sustain itself. Kindness is the actual physical fabric of what we think of as ‘me.” [Generosity in the Land of the Individualist]

There’s the story about a seeker and a wise man talking together and the wise person has a most incredible jewel. The seeker is absolutely dazzled by the jewel and asks the wise man if he would give him the jewel. And the wise man gives it to him. The seeker is very excited and afraid that the old wise man is going to change his mind, so he hastily says goodbye and goes off. A short while after that he reappears, approaches the wise man with great humility and respect, lays the jewel down in front of him on the ground and says he’d like to make a trade. He’d like to exchange this jewel. And the wise man asks him what he wants to exchange it for. The seeker says he would like to exchange the jewel for knowledge of how to gain the sort of mind that could give up a jewel like that without a second thought. [This story appears in Khanti – Patient Endurance]

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The gift of Dhamma excels all gifts. The flavour of Dhamma surpasses all flavours. The delight of Dhamma transcends all delights. Freedom from craving is the end of all suffering. Dhammapada 354

This post was created from the following references: Bhikkhu Bodhi: ‘Dana: The practice of Giving’. Ajahn Amaro: ‘Generosity in the Land of the Individualist’. Ajahn Jayasaro: ‘2. Khanti – Patient Endurance’ from ‘The Real Practice’ (Three Talks to the Monastic Community of Wat Pah Nanachat). Bhante Shravasti Dhammika – Link to source for: ‘Dāna, the development of its concept and practice’, Toshiichi Endo. Santikaro: ‘Practicing Generosity in a Consumer World’ from ‘Hooked’ (Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume) page 198

Photos: Kathina at Wat Pahnanachat 2010 by PB

Mitt Romney & Right Speech

Posted on September 17, 2012 by tiramit

Mitt Romney making mileage (one way or another) from events in Libya? He’s saying all the wrong things. As a general rule, Right Speech is not something politicians are good at. Their intention is to get people to believe in an illusion. Probably not very different from how things were 2600 years ago. The Buddha’s Teaching on Right Speech may well have been introduced after hearing the politicians of his day manipulating the truth for all the usual reasons. And that’s why we have the Teaching on Right Speech. It’s called ‘right’ speech because language doesn’t stretch far enough to accurately express all the subtleties of how people communicate. The important thing is to get it right and I’ve used Mitt Romney here as an example of getting it wrong.

‘The importance of speech in the context of Buddhist ethics is obvious: words can break or save lives, make enemies or friends, start war or create peace. The Buddha explained right speech as follows: 1. to abstain from false speech, especially not to tell deliberate lies and not to speak deceitfully, 2. to abstain from slanderous speech and not to use words maliciously against others, 3. to abstain from harsh words that offend or hurt others, and 4. to abstain from idle chatter that lacks purpose or depth.’ [Link to: thebigview/eightfoldpath]

‘Abandoning divisive speech… What he has heard here he does not tell there to break those people apart from these people here…Thus reconciling those who have broken apart or cementing those who are united, he loves concord, delights in concord, enjoys concord, speaks things that create concord…

Abandoning abusive speech… He speaks words that are soothing to the ear, that are affectionate, that go to the heart, that are polite, appealing and pleasing to people at large…

Abandoning idle chatter… He speaks in season, speaks what is factual, what is in accordance with the goal, the Dhamma, and the Vinaya. He speaks words worth treasuring, seasonable, reasonable, circumscribed, connected with the goal… [The Samaññaphala Sutta, Kevatta Sutta and Cunda Kammaraputta Sutta]

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‘In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, and endearing and agreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them. Why is that? Because the Tathagata has sympathy for living beings.’ [Abhaya Sutta]