Great Christmas, Great Year.
Matthew’s freedomforall.net blog links to and highlights the central message of a great Zenchick Christmas post. The message, for Matthew, is “being seen” in Zenchick’s day-after-Christmas message, “receiving.” I don’t doubt for a moment that Matthew is right, but there are additional ways for readers to look at Zenchick’s heartwarming look at her Christmas.
Scott of Scott Wichmann Online tells of his spectacular, eventful 2005 in a post titled “WHAT A YEAR!!!” The guy was a triple threat – athletically, spiritually, and on the stage – as well as as a mentor/friend, husband and blogger. Scott is a comedy star in Richmond, Virginia, particularly after his critically raved performance in “Scapino.”
Trev of The Sound of Diesel Musing, as careful readers of Blogmandu are already sure to know, had a great year, too, culminating in the recent release of his first album, “The Parachute EP.”
Danny Fisher sighting
Danny Fisher whose short-lived eponymous blog made a splash in the Buddhist-blogs pool early last year is waist-deep in blog water again with The Buddhist Chaplains’ Sangha. It’s a multi-contributor blog, but Danny is clearly the mainstay, contributing all but one of the posts since its launch in September.
Gathering Clouds, Lightning Bolts
Gareth of Green Clouds has been on a heavy philosophical bender this new year with posts that ask the hard questions and have garnered long comment streams. Of particular interest are posts on Death and Dying and relating to Richard Dawkins’ opposition to the idea of a Creator.
Here are some of Gareth’s words on looming death:
The myth that I will still be here tomorrow has a very real affect on the way I live today, I can see this very clearly in my own actions; the way I take less care over things than I should, because it will work out alright, in the end; the way I put things off until tomorrow, or make plans for the far future – while coasting along in the present.On the Creator controversy [Is there? Isn’t there?], Mark of Writing to Reach You waxes long and wanes not in his cleverly titled post “What if there were two moons in your sky?” An excerpt
I wonder, can I believe/practice Buddhism, yet believe some of Christianity too? Certainly I believe Jesus of Nazareth existed, and was definitely a Holy being. Maybe God and Buddha are the same--the Christian God not acting out of love for His creations and pact of free will, and the Buddha not acting due to being only omniscient, yet not omnipotent. Christ's definitely something like a Bodhisattva, that much is true.Games People Play
Jeff Wilson, who keyboards Tricycle Blog, writes in praise of the board game Wheel of Life [aka, BuddhaWheel?]:
The board is actually a reproduction of the famous Buddhist motif of the realms of samsara, and your goal as a player is to escape the wheel and become a Buddha; of course, once you become a Buddha you can opt to go back and help others still stuck, so in a way the game doesn't have any end at all.Will of thinkBuddha.org writes on the same topic, seeming a bit negative, at first, about the game, which he has read about but is yet to play. He writes,
… I tend to avoid board games because [of the latent] Napoleon within who surfaces from nowhere with a terrible lust for the ultimate conquest. … And whilst board-game manufacturers like to show pictures of happy families crouched around a board with smiles upon their faces, an image of sublime domestic harmony, my own long and bitter experience has been that at any one time, at least one of the players will be hunched into a glowering ball of resentment as they peer out at the board through half-closed eyes, brooding over the humiliation of defeat, comforted only by the thought that, eventually, the game will end.And now for something completely different …
There is no such comfort when it comes to the Wheel of Life. … You will plunge, to use an image from Shantideva, from one supremely generous act to another – shedding lives and limbs on the way – as joyfully as an elephant leaping into one cool lotus pool after another on a hot afternoon.
M of Zen Filter shows us a Zen litter box.
Zen Porn
In what will surely be one of the more interesting Buddhist blogosphere posts of aught-six, Shokai of Water Dissolves Water writes about a website titled Zen Porn and offers his general thoughts about the idea of the site, and the ready connections and difficulties of putting Zen and porn together. Here’s an excerpt from Shokai’s long and graphic-rich post:
Sensei points out that to fall in love requires an enormous leap of faith, overlooking the facts that our lovers are really just big sacks of skins containing organs and fluids and bone. We choose to ignore that the bodies that we crave so much also emit excrement, urine, pus, blood, sweat and tears. So another tactic for Zen porn might be to remind us of the impermanence of all things, including our bodies.The Religion of Hope
Zenmar, the Dark Zen Mystic, writes in his blog, The Buddhist, that Buddhism is the religion of hope. His words are in opposition to that of Buddhist physicalists. Here's a snip:
The nature of that which animates us is called many names in Buddhism such as "the light of the self", "the radiant mind", "thatness", "the pure will", "the Bodhi mind" and so on. It is also the very process of nirvana by which we come to unbind ourselves from our investment in the material which causes us to be reborn in many and varied worlds of suffering.
