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Images of Our Sitting Selves

| arun

Over on the One City Blog, Ethan Nichtern promotes the upcoming 24- hour Meditation Marathon in the window displays of ABC Carpet & Home.It is accompanied by the following picture, which first struck me as odd.

Why is the meditator sitting with her legs crossed like that? The graphic represents a beautiful symbolic ambiguity between either the lotus style or the agura style. This detail is small and for the most part insignificant, but the way we depict ourselves says a lot about our culture. Years ago I made a similar graphic, but with the meditator’s legs represented by a flat bar. I grew up learning to sit flat on the ground—“flat like a chair” as my brother describes it. “Flat” applies to the angle of your legs relative to your hips, regardless of whether you sit with both legs to the side, one leg in front of the other, one leg over the other, or both legs folded into padmasana. In contrast, our chair culture is much more conducive to people sitting in the X-style when they plop on the floor. I cannot understate how much I love the wonderful ambiguity in that design, and yet at the same time it leaves some of us out is something I couldn’t draw myself.

Thoughts on a Fist-Bump

| arun

Lama Choyin Rangdrol writes about the Dalai Lama’s fist-bump and what it means in the context of today’s world.

When I began my discussion some years ago no one imagined a black president would become the center of global politic, and that China would be nudging itself into a dominant position in global resource acquisition. I tried many times to bring my concerns to the Office of Tibet and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. My teacher, abbot of Namgyal Monastery, the Dalai Lama’s personal monastery, made many attempts to connect me with inside sources to no avail. There simply was little or no interest. I credit my late teacher, Khempo Gyurmed Tinly, with the vision to foresee the necessity of bridging this divide. He died in 2005. They know who he was, and know he tried. I also reached out to Obama folks; after all I live in Hawaii. But the change they were looking for at the time did not foresee the complexity of an American, Chinese, Tibetan matrix that would create pivotal sound bites, images, and editorials to be examined by competitive world leaders.

His thoughts are very much worth reading.

Recommended Posts by Ven. Dhammika

| arun

Bhante Shravasti Dhammika is going on pilgrimage and has left us with a list of recommended past posts. Unfortunately, these posts did not come with links, so I have taken the liberty to provide those below.

Now this Angry Asian chavassakhelapakassa has better get back to work…

This I Believe

| arun

Sorting through my drafts box, I found a stranded link to Trang Tran’s This I Believe essay, recounting a stay at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas (CTTB).

Before CTTB, I had never prayed, meditated, or read a Buddhist text in my life. I distinctly remember the discomfort of being in a new and vastly different environment and the inevitable challenges it brought. Yet, upon reflection, I realize that I have absolutely no regrets about the time between entering and exiting the sacred gates of the monastery. The sentient moments of serenity and sincere connection to mind, body, and spirit that I received resonate far beyond my time spent at CTTB and always will.

It sort of makes me want to visit the next time I find myself in Northern California. Maybe after I check out Rev. Harry and Dr. Scott’s live podcast recording!

Online Non-Sanghas

| arun

I had been planning to write about “virtual sanghas” but Dogo Barry Graham beat me to the punch. Predictably, his words are much more precise than what I would have written.

So it will probably surprise no one that I think there is no such thing as a virtual sangha. A bunch of people, one of whom may be a Dharma teacher, typing on keyboards is not a sangha.

A sangha practices together. Practice means the hard, inconvenient work of getting up and getting to the sangha meeting, sitting zazen, having dokusan, doing zazenkai and sesshin, and, day-to-day and week-to-week, working with your teacher to unravel the conditioning and core beliefs that run your life. It means engaging and interacting with the sangha, doing whatever tasks you are assigned to keep things working efficiently.

I’m not suggesting that there’s no point to blogging about your practice, or that the internet isn’t the great resource it is. But it’s no sangha substitute.

Don’t Rush the Western Buddhist

| arun

Barbara O’Brien elaborates on terms such as “modernization” or “westernization” and what these terms might mean in the context of Buddhist history.

There seems to be a rising tide of westerners interested in Buddhism who demand that it be “westernized” asap, stripped of ritual and anything “Asian.” The truth is, most of us have barely scratched the surface, and already we’re making judgments about which parts of Buddhism are “essential” and which aren’t.

The more time I spend with this remarkable tradition, the more grateful I am to the Asian teachers for their care and practice through the centuries. I feel no rush to “westernize” anything. First we should be sure we can maintain the teachings with the same care that brought them to us.

These words are indeed of some comfort to me, but they fail to deal with a central concern in a couple ofprevious posts. Aside from the many issues with what “Western” means, the discussion of “Western Buddhism” is still one that marginalizes Asian Buddhists of the West in the very community where we comprise the outright majority. Apparently we may be welcome into Western Buddhism, our contributions admired, our history acknowledged—but only so long as our say is not proportional to our greater numbers. This Western Buddhist rhetoric is so offensive precisely due to its implicit suggestion that Asian Westerners and our culture do not properly belong in the West.

I have a hunch that there will never be a distinct Western Buddhism, so the very discussion of it may be in vain. We live in a world that is ever more globalized, interconnected, transnational and multicultural in ways that defy historical precedent. Imagine what the Buddhist blogosphere will be like with millions of Chinese Buddhist bloggers! What this increasing entanglement also suggests, however, is that while there may not emerge a “Western” Buddhism, Buddhism in general will appropriate more “Western” features. And perhaps the West will also become more Buddhist.

East Side/West Side

| arun

In her most recent post, Barbara O’Brien wades back into the Western vsAsian Buddhist debate. She proposes that “the big, honking issue in Western Buddhism is what parts of Asian Buddhism are essential, and what parts are not?” Her perspective however suffers from a common flaw also held by Jerry Kolber’s post on merchandizing Buddhism. Namely, it marginalizes the majority of Western Buddhists.

The majority of Western Buddhists are after all Asian Buddhists who practice various unique styles of Buddhism here in the West. By framing her thesis as she does, in one fell swoop Barbara relegates the Asian majority to the fringes of Western Buddhism and places her cultural perspective smack in the center. She almost deserves points for literary sumo, but her approach is regrettably more the norm than the exception in Western Buddhist discourse.

Then she goes on to tie our popular misconceptions to our culture.

The meat of her post is on Asian “folk” Buddhism, presented in contrast to the original teachings. The Asian “folk” Buddhism conveys karma as fate and rebirth as reincarnation of a singular soul. But there is nothing fundamentally Asian about these beliefs, as her words suggest. These ideas stem from simplistic ideas of the self, a problem not unique to Asian folk. The concepts of fate and reincarnation have ancient and enduring roots in Western culture, and self-styled Western Buddhists have already been (mis)interpreting karma and rebirth accordingly.

Buddhism in the West will likely have to deal with these misconceptions, home-grown or otherwise, in the same way that Buddhism in the East has had to: with study, practice and tolerance.

Shambhala Diversity

| arun

Given my previous criticism of the racial “diversity” of the Shambhala Sun staff, the title of this post may appear to be tongue-in-cheek. Not so this time! While fixing links on this blog, I stumbled across Shambhala’s diversity page, which has a very honest (and I might even say welcoming) feel to it:

What we share as a community is a desire to lead sane, dignified, and confident lives. Through the practice of meditation we cultivate the capacity to be fully open to our experience, and the ability to respond to everyday life situations with greater clarity and respect—respect not only for our life situations and ourselves, but for all individuals, social groups and cultures as well.

This does not mean that Shambhala is a perfect society. If you visit one of our centres, you may find that it does not mirror in every way the characteristics of the people who live in the cities or towns where our centres are located. But please note that it is the intention—and the stated policy—of our centres to welcome everyone who enters. This intention is at the very core of the Shambhala Buddhist teachings.

Now I have to give major props to their very impressive diversity resources page. If you’re interested in diversity, please check it out and let me know what you think. I haven’t even begun to read through it, but you can be sure I will follow through on every one of those links. Thanks Shambhala!

Just Another Monk’s Story

| arun

Bhante Yuttadhammo’s case is over. Charges dismissed. (Congrats!) He writes:

At this point, I have to express my appreciation for the people who have supported me over the past five, six months. There’ve been a lot of people upset or at least unsupportive of my choices in life, but in the end, when the chips are down, it’s amazing how people can just come together and pitch in to help a guy out of a jam… even a monk-guy. Thanks everybody, you know who you are.

You can read his entire account on his blog. If you want an American Buddhist story, then look no further!

Asian-Free Buddhism

| arun

Thanks to Barbara’s Buddhism Blog, I was pointed to a Beliefnet post by Jerry Kolber, where he explicitly argues for stripping Buddhism of its Asian features.

Image is everything, and unless we figure out a way to make the image of the Buddha hip and cool, we’d be better off figuring out some other way to present the techniques without the awesome smiling face of our Eastern inspiration.

Bless his non-soul for proposing a sincere and unequivocal argument for whitewashing Buddhism. He has no compunction whatsoever about smugly proclaiming that Buddhism in America is far better off if only we can ditch the Asian guy. And he is like a gift that keeps on giving, except that I really don’t care for this narishkeyt…

Buddhism in America is at the long end of the initial boom sparked in the 60’s among intellectuals and artists who craved that elite connection with the east.

With a single sentence, he dons the hat of a historical revisionist and wipes American Buddhist history clean of its Asian affliction. The author disregards the basic fact that Buddhism in America enjoys an unbroken history that stretches back over 100 years. For all those years, it is Asian Americans who have constituted the outright numerical majority of Buddhist Americans—even today, we are still the majority. Plain and simple, Buddhism in America wouldn’t be half of what it is without its Asian American members, and for Jerry Kolber to patently neglect our contributions with utter impunity smacks entirely of excessive hegemonic privilege.