Buddhists in the Military Blog
Bernie Simon of The Careless Hand offers a tepid recommendation of a group blog for Buddhists in the military, called Buddhist Military Sangha: An Online Resource for Buddhists Associated with the United States Armed Forces. Bernie writes, rather pessimistically, “It's fairly new and looks promising, but new blogs have a way of falling over and dying.” I suppose that’s true and could, sadly, be said of the soldiers, themselves, too -- which is, I guess, what Bernie's alluding to. The eight-member Blogger blog has a light posting history since its start on July 26, but is very, very well written, fully capably done, with many helpful links for soldiers in its sidebar. It looks solid, like a young Marine officer, and I'd bet it'll be a stand-up blog for a good long while.
A recent post by Navy Lt. Jeanette Shin is a Dharma Talk in observance of Halloween that looks at “horror films with a Buddhist theme.”
Danny Fisher of Danny Fisher wrote about the Buddhists Military Sangha in a post in early August. In the fascinating comment thread, Ray King, a UK citizen and member of the Amida Pureland School, wrote, “I'm interested in trying to understand how a buddhist reconciles his faith with belonging to the US military.” Lt. Shin responded, “What happens if we just got rid of our military? Do you think persons everywhere will have peace and happiness? … Kind thoughts and words alone will not protect our cities and our temples (or for that matter, Hindu temples, Christian churches, AND Muslim mosques, or any other place of worship) from people who would like to see them gone. The Reason we have the freedom [to] practice Buddha-dharma is people who serve in the military.”
Danny then wrote a long, thoughtful three-topic response that an abridgment by me would not do justice. [Read it here.] His conclusion, with respect to America’s military presence in Iraq: “At some point, everyone connected to this war needs to own their accountability and respond. They have to refuse service, refuse to pay taxes, refuse to sign over funds, demonstrate, and so on. A Buddhism that would excuse us from looking at the realities and the complexities of war is unacceptable.”
For my part, I recently wrote that I wouldn't mind seeing a precise, surgical American military assault in Burma. I regret that sentiment, maybe. From passages I have visited today at Access to Insight, Buddha offers no comfort to warriors. Most germane to the matter is this from the Sumyatta sutra, ch 42.3 "To Yodhajiva (The Warrior)". Here, a bit of it, quoting Buddha:
When a warrior strives & exerts himself in battle, his mind is already seized, debased, & misdirected by the thought: 'May these beings be struck down or slaughtered or annihilated or destroyed. May they not exist.' If others then strike him down & slay him while he is thus striving & exerting himself in battle, then with the breakup of the body, after death, he is reborn in the hell called the realm of those slain in battle. But if he holds such a view as this: 'When a warrior strives & exerts himself in battle, if others then strike him down & slay him while he is striving & exerting himself in battle, then with the breakup of the body, after death, he is reborn in the company of devas slain in battle,' that is his wrong view. Now, there are two destinations for a person with wrong view, I tell you: either hell or the animal womb."The Great Michael O'Keefe
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Sharon Salzberg pulls a Buddhist full Ginsburg
Interesting bits of news tell us that Sharon Salzberg is in upcoming podcasts from both of Buddhism Online’s quality producers of such, the IDProject and Buddhist Geeks. In baseball terms, Salzberg has converted a double play. In Sunday-morning-talkshow terminology, it’s a full Ginsburg when you get saturation coverage.
Ethan Nichtern began his The IDProject newsletter, which I received yesterday, with these words, “This past Wednesday night, our Guest Lecture Series attained new levels of awesomeness with a visit from Sharon Salzberg, one of the foremost meditation teachers in America (soon to be available on The Interdependence Project podcast).”
Vince of Buddhist Geeks put up a picture of fellow Geek Ryan Oelke in his personal blog, Numinous Nonsense, with a caption that began with this sentence: “Ryan doing the voiceover for this week’s Buddhist Geeks episode w/ Sharon Salzberg.” Vince tells us Geek Gwen Bell conducted the interview.
Could it be that Salzberg has a new book out? From a search at Amazon, I find she has a 30-page book/2 CD/contemplation cards package called Unplug coming out in five months. She might be plugging that. [The title may be a reference to The Matrix idea of joining The Real World OR may focus on the simpler idea of relieving stress OR both. “You gotta unplug, man,” said Kroy to Keanu’s coppertop Neo.] She also has a mass paperback version of her 2004 book Lovingkindness coming out next April, published by Shambhala.
Update: The podcasts have been posted. Here are links to Susan Salzberg's three-part podcast with Buddhist Geeks [#1, #2, #3] and the IDProject's 21st Century Buddhism, "GUEST LECTURE: Interdependence and Lovingkindness."
Eight
As many of us learn, tangential to our study of Ch’an (Chinese Zen), the number eight is considered lucky by those in China and by Chinese whom have emigrated worldwide. Thus it is no weird coincidence that the summer Olympics are set to begin in Beijing on August 8, 2008, at 8:08pm (or, maybe, eight seconds and eight nanoseconds thereafter).
Tags: buddhism, buddhoblogosphere, Michael O'Keefe, Sharon Salzberg
