Roundup for Aug 7, 2006

Another day and yet more great posts spring from the Buddhoblogosphere. Hurray! ...

David Brazier, author of one of my very favorite zen books, Zen Therapy, is fearful re the future of the dollar. He writes in Dharmavidya Web, “For the US to get out of deficit would require unthinkable economic and political shifts here but for it not to do so is like being on a slippery slope. Sooner or later balance will be lost and all will come crashing down.”

Phra Prasong stamps out little clay Buddha images, Noah tells us and shows us in Yuttadhammo. “What a neat idea - a Buddha in your pocket. Just make sure it's a shirt pocket, not a butt pocket!”

In a long rambling post that hangs together beautifully, Paul, A Blue-Eyed Buddhist, writes about Highway 99, zips past Green Lake, and ends up thinking about nuclear weapons, and in the midst of this section, the war in Lebanon. He returns to Highway 99 at the end and it is as if his post were a round trip, an enso. Here is the last bit of it:

Is it ever justifiable to use a nuke? What if you’re not using it on a city, but on a military base? What if you give a 3 day warning ahead of time? What if the bad guys use several against you?

These are hard questions. Perhaps I’m not a good Buddhist, because the answers to some of them don’t snap immediately into my head. In fact, I wonder about them, and struggle with them.

These are things I was thinking about while driving back down highway 99 tonight.

Dave of Via Negativa writes about nukes, too. A poem about the blast over Nagasaki, “On the Birthday of Death.”

Tuesday 8/8 is primary election day in Connecticut. The last sentence in Mumon’s Notes in Samsara post relates his sentiments starkly: “I never liked Joe Lieberman.”

Will of thinkBuddha writes about the challenge of putting together ideas for his PhD thesis that meet his interests. Ethics and stories become his focus, and the merging of East and West. Here, he writes about seminal thoughts:

Through the practice of the dharma, through meditation, reflection, the reading of the Buddhist texts, my sense of life and of my own place within it shifted. The old frameworks of thought within which I was operating seemed no longer adequate. … the frameworks handed down through the traditions of Buddhism, although I was fascinated and… moved by them, seemed to be inadequate as a way of allowing me to think through the questions that were raised by practice. They were too alien, they rested upon metaphysical premises that I could not accept, they were too Buddhist.

As if in response to Will, above, Tyson of tysonwilliams.com quotes the Dalai Lama on our relationship with our practice. Here’s a snippet: “To investigate the teaching critically is fully encouraged in the same way that medical students are encouraged to apply their theories to real life and thus to witness their validity.”

Robert of Beginner’s Mind finds a really really great quote from Alan Alda, no less.

Bill LaLonde of Oaksong’s Nemeton is way too easy to please. But, wait a second. I’m pretty damn happy about his post. Hmmm.

Here’s a pop quiz you may take before reading Bill of Integral Options Café’s answers to his book meme.

What one book changed Bill’s life?

1. The Atman Project by Ken Wilber
2. The Story of O by Pauline Reage
3. Nicholas Nickelby by Charles Dickens
4. The Puppy who wanted a Boy by Jane Thayer and Lisa McCue

What one book has Bill read more than once?

1. The first four books of the five-part trilogy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
2. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
3. One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss
4. Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy by John leCarre

What one book would Bill want on a desert island?

1. The Perfect Storm
2. Complete Works of Shakespeare
3. Complete Works of Umberto Eco
4. Dune

What one book most made Bill laugh?

1. Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore
2. Picture This by Joseph Heller
3. Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Bastard By Al Franken
4. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

What one book does Bill wish had never been written?

1. My Pet Goat
2. Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler
3. Over the River and Through the Trees by Ernest Hemingway
4. [Bill chooses not to name one]

What one book does Bill wish he had written?

1. Liberalism: The religion of the Godless by Bill Harryman
2. Ulysses by Bill Harryman
3. Mystic River by Bill Harryman
4. Sex, Ecology and Spirituality by Bill Harryman

More Tasty Roundup-Type Stuff

• Speedlinking 8/7/06 by William Harryman of Integral Options Cafe Another bountiful linkfest, with a long paper on proportional response and the best Talking Head taking us to Jesus Camp.
• Speedlinking 8/8/06 by William Harryman of Integral Options Cafe Should be up by about 5:15am PT on 8/8.
• Mark of Zen Filter offers us a heapin' helpin' of Zen Cake. Delicious but weird.

Technorati tags: buddhism, roundup, speedlinking

Roundup for Aug 6, 2006

A list of some interest Top Ten Buddhism-tagged blogs, per Technorati *
rank	blog name	in- links
1	WoodMoor Village	71
2t	Integral Options Café	70
2t	thinkBuddha	70
4	Tibet Will Be Free	64
5t	The Buddist Blog	62
5t	Zip Zap Zop	62
7	Metacentricities	57
8	Zencast	49
9t	lotus in the mud	48
9t	Paper Frog	48
* After eliminating sites with 8 or more tags when no more that 25% are, in a broad sense, Buddhism-related.

Good stuff, flowing like a distinct and flavorful non-alcoholic red wine, comes to us from the Buddhoblogosphere ...

Streamin’

Limit the Buddhism and make room for shrooms. Daniel of The Hyperaware Consciousness writes about the awesome effect of psilocybin as confirmed from yet another study – this time one conducted by Johns Hopkins.

Life of Brian: All right. I’m the last person on earth who would want to promote zaadz – and paid agent ~C4Chaos of the same-name blog is the first person. But Ceefour’s picture of his zaadz T-shirt is pretty cool. It looks like the Michelangelo ceiling with the Zaadz God passing on the spark of life to mankind through his Z-stroke finger. Wait a minute. Actually, it's intentionally that way and scary as hell.

George of Sentient Developments looks at a new book called The Female Brain. Here’s the opening paragraph of the flap description George provides:

Every brain begins as a female brain. It only becomes male eight weeks after conception, when excess testosterone shrinks the communications center, reduces the hearing cortex, and makes the part of the brain that processes sex twice as large.

The Thunder Bay bhikkhu is on a rampage about a piece in the New York Post that says the Israelis are “too nice to win” their war. One historical declaration the article makes is that firebombing Dresden and using atom bombs against Japan was necessary for the Allies to win WWII. Retorts Ajahn Punnadhammo in Bhikkhu’s Blog, “The war in Europe was pretty much won when Dresden was firebombed ... And as for Hiroshima, John Denson makes the case better than I can, in this excellent essay on the Hiroshima Myth.”

Xiao of That Was Zen, This Is Tao – A Haiblog is excited and elequant as hell, writing about life in New York City. Here’s a chunk from her post:

Every day is an incredible adventure. A chance encounter to meet someone new or someone from my past. Some people I will never see again. Others I will see the next day. Some plan to die in New York and others are here for a quick trip. All of these people, people, people, doing amazing things, living their lives, discovering themselves and the world each and every moment, whether they know it or not.

morgonnels in his eponymous blog tells us he’s been reading The Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-Five Thousand Lines. He mostly focuses on one interesting element from the book, the last item in a list of the “nine unlovely perceptions,” Great Pathetic Joy. You read that right. Not Great Sympathetic Joy, but Pathetic. morgonnels does some investigating and finds this definition: “According to Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, pathetic comes from the Greek pathetos, meaning ‘liable to suffer.’” And from there, he comes to believe he has found the meaning of this Joy, most curious.

hitchhiker72 offers a two-part account on the difficulties in pursuing an education, that puts her at the door of completing work on a Ph.D, in posts “Salute to Sisyphus, Part I” and “Salute to Sisyphus, Part II” in her blog A Question of Mindfulness. It’s a fascinating story, well delivered. What began as an academic challenge to “find herself” became a daunting hydra-headed struggle. hitchhiker72 writes, “I sometimes felt like a bag lady rummaging for scraps, I cannot really know whether the outcome would have been different or whether a more plotted route would have resulted in a difference in my thinking. That I was left to meander along on my own meant I found paths that might otherwise have remained hidden.”

More Tasty Roundup-Type Stuff

• Speedlinking 8/6/06 by William Harryman of Integral Options Cafe A bountiful linkfest. If you don't eat your English walnuts, make sure your hamsters eat theirs. Oh, and stay away from Gagdad Bob. It's a tarpit, I'm telling you.
• Speedlinking 8/7/06 by William Harryman of Integral Options Cafe Should be up by about 5:15am PT on 8/7.
• Zen Filter and Jinajik were quiet. Zzzzzzzz.

Technorati tags: zshirt, buddhism, roundup, speedlinking

Roundup for Aug 5, 2006

Good stuff, as always, is flowing through from the blogosphere ...

Streamin’

Jai of Blog Blog Woof Woof offers the thoughts of Ajahn Chah, which begin with this sentence: “The source of all good, evil, weal and harm lies with actions, speech and thoughts.”

Odd things can summon a mystic moment or even full-bore enlightenment: the sparkle of light on a pewter dish, the deep sound of a bell. Moose, The Contemporary Taoist has a mystic moment when he dumps a forkful of beans on his clothes. He writes, “Mystic Moments are hard to describe. … A ‘moment of clarity’ where the normal appears Divine; the small appears enormous; the subtle becomes obvious; the truth becomes apparent; the God in all common things becomes easy to see.”

Oliver, a martial arts expert and boxer at Oxford University in England, posted an entry “I’m afraid of Americans. I’m afraid of the World” in his recently minted blog Oxol. Here’s a spiffy snippit, that like the whole of his post, does not connect up to the title quite like you might suppose:

It struck me that the problems I’ve been having with annatta (the not-self doctrine) could be a result of a fundamental flaw in my conception of its purpose. My own conceptions of identity have revolved around the Western notion of a self, however, as the teaching of the Buddha is intended as a practical path to reaching enlightenment, that there is no self is not necessarily an ontological declaration. It’s simply not a relevant consideration, for if one was to reach enlightenment, processes of thought like whether there is a self or not would not enter into their thought because their perception of the world would be radically different.

Nagarjuna comes out against terrorism, big time, in a post in Naked Reflections titled “Thar He Blows.”

Eric of the blog Eric Grey writes about attachment. His post begins, “Today a relative of my partner was killed when the experimental home-made plane he was piloting crashed into a golf course.”

BuddhoBlogBuzz: Morgan Spurlock and 30 Days

There is definitely a Buzzz going on in my corner of the blogosphere re Morgan Spurlock – of Super Size Me fame – and his documentary TV series on the FX network, 30 Days. I write “in my corner” because most of the buzz eminates from near where I live in metropolitan Sacramento.

I wrote an essay in the group political blog Thoughts Chase Thoughts a few days ago called “Morgan Spurlock and the 2nd Tier.” My partner at TCT, Nagarjuna, followed with his very very excellent post, “Altered Realities” in his blog Naked Reflections that included comments on many of the series's episodes. Re the first episode where Spurlock and his girlfriend tried to survive on minimum wage, Nagarjuna writes, "I acquired newfound empathy for those who are caught in this kind of lifestyle of having to literally count every penny and being thrown into emotional as well as financial turmoil by the slightest unbudgeted expense"

A comment posted by John Smulo in the TCT thread led to the knowledge of two recent posts by John in his SmuloSpace blog focusing on 30 Days: 30 Days of Purpose and 30 Days Outsourced. Seems Nagarjuna was already aware of John – there being a comment written by Nagarjuna posted to the 30 Days Outsourced comment thread when I first got there.

Here’s a bit from John’s 30 Days of Purpose post that I could say is true for myself:

What inspires me most about this show is that it chronicles human beings with strong opinions and self-imposed separations living life with people coming from a contrary place.

John finds Biblical connections in what Spurlock is doing in his series, whereas Nagarjuna and I see Buddhism-related inspiration. Likely, we are all right.

Pennsylvanian Carolyn Kellogg who blogs Pinky’s Paperhaus has a recent entry about her friend, the camera guy who filmed Spurlock during his jailtime stay, which is this season of 30 Days grand finale. Interesting blog stuff! [Carolyn/Pinky, btw, has a post w/podcast from yesterday about her appearance on NPR. WTG, Pinky.]

There is also a very recent post giving us an atheist’s take on 30 Days. vjack in Atheist Revolution writes, “an atheist moving in with a family of evangelical Christians. Interesting idea, but I think they might have it backwards. … a show in which an atheist becomes more accepting of conservative Christian beliefs (my prediction) would be a big mistake. Why? Oh, just because these beliefs happen to be false.” The post generated a lot of comment, mostly in full support of vjack’s sentiments.

In a recent MySpace post, Arnold, a kendo expert in San Jose, writes, "The beauty of this show is that we get to see not a conversion, but a transformation in the thinking of the person going through the 30 days experience. Additionally, it creates a catalyst for us viewers to think about the topic as well as to contemplate and appreciate our lives."

More, More Tasty Roundup-Type Stuff

• Speedlinking 8/5/06 by William Harryman of Integral Options Cafe A bodacious collection. Philosophical and Integral. Nada on politics, today.
• Speedlinking 8/6/06 by William Harryman of Integral Options Cafe Should be up by about 5:15am on 8/6.
• Zen Filter and Jinajik were quiet. Zzzzzzzz.

Technorati tags: morgan spurlock, 30 days, thirty days, buddhism, roundup, speedlinking

Roundup for Aug 4, 2006

Many interesting posts in the ether today. Here are a handful of them...

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.

Roundup for Aug 3, 2006

The first of an every-once-in-a-while daily roundup for the summer.

OK, I can’t stand it. There is too much that is winsome and juicy going on in the oceanic Buddhoblogosphere to keep my 10-gallon Roundup hat in the mudroom for the rest of the summer, so I’m pulling it down from the hook, booting up my computer, climbing on my keyboard stallion and roping some posts, again. EEEE-ha!

Now, I hope I hope I hope I hope I hope I hope that Bill of the IOC [q.v.] and WH’s Blog [q.v.] keeps up his speedlinking regimen. AND, that tinythinker of peaceful turmoil [q.v.] and Justin of American Buddhist Perspective [q.v.] wade in with some more roundups. AND, I hear, via the IOC, that Jay Andrew Allen is speedlinkin’ at The Zero Boss[q.v.]. There’s plenty ‘o room in the pool, a course; and I am but a mere bug in the shadow of these noble, sturdy men. [What? No ladies as yet? You just know you should be speed-roundup-linkin’, too.]

AND, I must express my gratitude to Mark of Zen Filter [q.v.] and Ian of Jinajik [q.v.] for their ongoing ropings of outstanding webfinds. Here, too, are establishments that fill my plate and stein with the grub and grog of wonders and pleasures that I consume with glee and gusto!

Indeed, it is from the very deliciousness of the finds of all these Blogo-meta-buddhs that has me salivatin’ for the fresh meat* of gamey blogpost. Mmmmmm, tasty wild blogpost; there is nothin’ so fine.

So, let us release the ox and have the Blogmandu rodeo commence …

Streamin'

Noah of Yuttadhammo: Truth is Within shows us one of his samanera. "This one eats in the evening and can't sit still for more than one inbreath at a time. He's really cute, though."

Our conservative Buddhist friend, Joshua, of Mudita Journal tells us of the website Life is Zen. It's motto is “Mindful Marketing for Your Right Livelihood.” Writes Joshua, "Now how can you not like a slogan like that?"

Mathew Dallman in his The Daily Goose finds himself agreeing with George Will and tells us American liberalism is dead. "[I]ts truths have been swallowed by certain elements/circles of the American conservative movement."

tsykoduk of The Roost writes about an interesting talk on the O'Reily Factor. [Hey! Wait a minute! With the citations on the two paragraphs above this one, that's three conservative posts on three different Buddhist blogs in one day!?]

The Bhikkhu apologizes ... for blogging so much about the Lebanon war. Explains Ajahn Punnadhammo in Bhikkhu's Blog, "Our world seems to be spiralling down into a new barbarism with only the ethic of 'might makes right.'"

Bill LaLonde informs us in Oaksong's Nemeton that our brains "may be under the control of tiny critters that live in cat shit."

nagarjuna posts brilliantly on episodes of Morgan Spurlock's FX network show, 30 Days, in his blog Naked Reflections and finds himself agreeing with some other guy that "Spurlock shows Buddhistic benevolence and skillful means in using his talents to foster interpersonal and intercultural empathy." [The words quoted here are nagarjuna's. Envious other guy writes that well in his dreams.]

Tyson of tysonwilliams.com quotes Sogyal Rinpoche. Here's a taste: "the ground of the ordinary mind prevents us from breaking through to the skylike nature of our mind, even if we can still have glimpses of it." And in a second post, Tyson quotes Buddhist Channel on the topic of Buddhism after the Dalai Lama has left the world stage.

Partings and Startings and Kudos and Such

Paper Frog has now, officially, left the pond! Kit has promised he'll be back in some new forms soon, and will keep the frog alive in his pocket; for now, we must do without.

The Daily Scribe [q.v.], "an evolving compendium of quality religious writing by bloggers," has been honored with the addition of Gareth's Green Clouds [q.v.] as part of its membership. GC joins Will's thinkBuddha [q.v.] as the two representatives of Buddhism in the Scribe's registry. Says Gareth in his latest post, "it’s a collective I’m happy to be a part of." Another Scribe-honored blog, Arbitrary Marks, has a fine recent post Gareth recommends, titled "Buddhist Apples and Christian Oranges."

An outstanding new Buddhist blog of great marvels y'all should be uber alerted to is Enso It Goes [q.v.], the clever production of clever Dukkha Earl. Here's D.E.'s latest, a jiggly post. Earl's earlier pearl of a blog, Sifting Samsara, was carried off by the wind, into the setting sun, about a year ago.


*This is a vegetarian blogsite, y’all. Meat as in nutmeat and 'Meat me in St. Louie, Louie,' not animal flesh, a course.

[Note. A Daily Blogmandu Roundup is a short post of both very very fresh finds in the Buddhoblogosphere and recent (and sometimes a little less fresh) sightings of wonders relating to Buddhist and integral bloggery.]