The Stream
Shokai opens the Zen Center. Some arrive late; some arrive very late; sometimes, for a while, no one shows up at all. In his blog, Water Dissolves Water, he writes, “Human interactions are always chaotic and messy, and rarely do they conform to a schedule. We should sit and we should share the dharma with others who want it, and we shouldn't be concerned if the audience is large or small, early or late, attentive or bored, passive or aggressive.”
Hardcore Zen’s Brad Warner is putting together his documentary Cleveland's Screaming. “The process of artistic creation is a little like Zen. Or maybe a lot like it. The problems your piece has are always obvious and the solutions to them are equally so.”
Zenmar launches into a discussion of mysticism in his blog The Buddhist. “[T]here is a huge divide between those who seek ultimate reality and those who fervently believe in some kind of uber-being who, if they obey his rules, will be saved from their ignorance.
Chase of Cut to the Chase is happy about something congress did today. “The bill passed was the (revised) PETS Act. … Now if a natural disaster happens, local AND state plans have to include provisions for our furry kids.”
~C4Chaos of the eponymous blog likes the recent Nicolas Cage movie Lords of War, but it is his serendipitous find, relating to the film, a quote in Rigpa, that got my attention. Here’s the last of it:
The desperate situation of the planet is slowly waking people up to the necessity for transformation on a global scale.
Enlightenment is real, and there are enlightened masters still on the earth. When you actually meet one, you will be shaken and moved in the depths of your heart and you will realize that all the words, such as illumination and wisdom, that you thought were only ideas are in fact true.
A Limitted Discussion Starter
Nacho's first effort at putting up a featured post to stir a wealth of discussion is meeting limitted success.
While the WoodMoor Village post, about people of color, has stayed at the top of his posting flow on the main page of his busy blog, it generated only two comments in six days before Nacho churped in with a response to the responses. Two other comments followed; so now there are a total of five.
Nacho's post seems not to have been a good one to encourage discussion. It is a hard slog -- 2200 words of muddily written turgid prose. Nacho sees conspiracies, hates oppressive whites and then compains and complains. His proffered subsitute for the phrase people of color, that he finds so damnable, is one of the following phrases, to be used for persons like himself: "Third World people" or "the excluded." Nacho is a college professor in Oregon. Or, perhaps I should say, 'Third World Nacho, the excluded, suffers the deprivation of being well-paid as an incompetent college professor in Oregon.'
Here a cutting from "Buddhist people of color?"
The language of “people of color” that has been deployed in Buddhist communities (and everywhere else) in order to address issues related to discrimination, racism, and inclusivity, poorly serves us. It strikes me as odd, at best, to rely on a phrase that reaffirms and reinforces what has been dominant ideology, by putting us right smack in the traditional U.S. society color/skin dichotomy. This chromatic skin color language reduces the complexity of the issues at stake in various ways, and promotes the dissemination and retrenchment of the color dichotomy. Ultimately, the phrase "people of color" limits the myriad ways in which the oppressed can describe and imagine their oppression, by reducing discriminatory practices under the umbrella of "color." In my estimation, the language of “people of color” makes us pay too steep a price politically, strategically, and personally.
