Love

from:

peace is every step

 

from: 

random home and heart photos

This is Mount Gede as seen from our front porch, one of two volcanoes that are connected. Looking at it is very calming and centering. Centuries ago Indonesia was once Buddhist but somehow religion and even naming does not seem relevant when immersed in nature.    

 

Closer look...

Morning sun, flower, me, inter-are...

The view to one side of our front porch.

Bamboo and metal wind chimes call,  

evoke, remind and reconnect. 

 

This is a "village" rose. Here "village" has a derogatory connotation meaning narrow-minded but it can also mean hardy like this rose bush which is easy to take care of and has lots of gorgeous flowers!

  

This flower is common here and not sold but we have not figured out how it reproduces...

This wood Buddha statue is from Bali. I had a very strong affinity for it the first time I saw it. I love polishing it with teak oil and seeing the wood darken in color. I haven't been able to identify the mudra, but more importantly the hands are perfectly placed to hold hibiscus flowers which is my offering to myself and those who see it...

Pair of statues from Cambodia...

Loyal and good friends are very important on the path!!!

perspective/reflection

This is the view from our living room windows. A good friend took this picture last week while visiting with his family. Ten years ago we were both single guys on the loose acting out a second adolescence and now are both married with kids... Time.. flies...

Early in the morning and on clear days on the right a huge volcano is visible which is part of a national park. Every time I see it, its still like - wow that's big! It provides perspective for us, people, of time and nature as something that vastly exceeds our human life spans. Speaking personally sometimes its easy to forget this.

Years ago I learned about farming, walking and working barefoot on foothills below the volcano on land across from my martial arts school's training center. In the afternoon the earth would be so warm from the sun or during rainy season muddy and slippery in a very elemental way. Surprising how much one can feel through the soles of one's feet! One day I remember standing barefoot feeling rooted in a very good spot, watching bamboo sway and plants vibrate with the wind and sun and suddenly there was the thought, "the earth is alive and I am part of it". There was something both incredibly finite and infinite about that moment, the sense of being part of something vast and complex, yet alive, vibrant and immediate. Its the same feeling but different scale as holding a handful of seeds and feeling the energy, the potential for growth and expression, some powerful and ancient dance that we are part of yet only slightly understand. Human agency seems irrelevant in this context, our job seems to be to witness, to experience and wonder.     

Watching the fog on the hills or cover the landscape and blow right over our porch is pretty cool.

Early morning I love watching the sky turn from dark blue black to pink and orange and then the sun crest over the hills. Unfortunately if I am watching it, that means I am late with my morning meditation but I guess everything has a tradeoff...

May my eyes, heart and soles of my feet always be open to these joys!

May clouds, flowers and mountains always inspire and excite!

May good friends continue to grace and share our lives!

May my children continue to grow and learn with respect and wonder!

May I gain in wisdom, insight and humility.

Race, Diversity and Buddhism: Thoughts and a Proposal

Although I have been an activist for a long time and during my college years helped lead a student protest movement for diversity, to this day I dread discussions about race, the feelings they bring up in myself and others, the conflict that arises, and the ultimate and inescapable dissatisfaction with the ways things end. But recently I've been stirred and inspired by Arun at Angry Asian Buddhist, and even more recently by posts and comments by Nathan at Dangerous Harvests, and Katie at Kloncke.

At the same time I am concerned by the generally unsatisfactory discussion about race and diversity on many Buddhist blogs. These discussions have been full of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, hurt feelings all around, blanket statements, and a general lack of compassion or insight. Its often as if we don't really hear what others are saying but are separately instead engaged in a discussion with ghosts from previous discussions with all the accumulated baggage. At times we shout past each other, selectively hearing and cherry picking what is said for more fuel to add to the fire. It is even more regrettable when these discussions involve Buddhists because there is just extra arrow added on top of extra arrow, increasing suffering and seemingly disdaining the skillful means we as Buddhists should be developing and practicing.

Why have or participate in these discussions then? For me personally at a certain level there really is no choice. From a very young age, standing up to racism or asserting myself in a forum with racial overtones was part of an existential struggle. I felt like if I didn't speak out, stand up and fight back, I would not exist as a person and any risk was worth taking to prevent that. Those times I was silent or didn't fight back, I would torture myself again and again remembering my failure, cowardice and humiliation and despising myself for my weakness.

With meditation I have started to realize that the cost of anger is a steep one - the loss of personal balance and objectifying the focus of my anger which in other words is dehumanization and doing to someone else the very thing I don't want to happen to me. That's not to say I still don't get angry but the intensity has lessened and its not as all consuming. There is the awareness on some sort of fundamental level that the anger is not me and I am more than just the anger. I can be somewhat objective and watch it as an observer.

Also there is the realization that not every battle has to be joined, not every comment answered. We can choose not to accept those "gifts" as Goenkaji calls them (reminded of this by a post on Kloncke). There is something powerful in standing up for oneself and fighting back. There is also something powerful about restraint, abstaining, taking the time and space to just be.  

What comes next after the fighting and then the restraint and abstaining? How about a try for the middle way? I have been listening and working on Gil Fronsdal's Concentration series at Audio Dharma. At one point he describes concentration meditation like fishing - too much slack and the fish gets away, too forceful and the line will break. Perhaps these discussions on race needs to be the same - enough creative tension to get people thinking outside of their normal assumptions but not some much as to make them defensive. Easier said than done but adding compassion, trying out equanimity and remembering we are all in this together could help. What if at the point where someone says something that brings on very strong feelings of aversion and rejection - we try and label these feelings and then watch them with non reactive awareness? What would happen if we could get angry at someone else's limited and seemingly bigoted perspective but then put that feeling in a "larger container" and watch its power fade?

What if we could listen to each other for what lies behind our words?

Could there be a simple and shared desire to be heard, acknowledged and appreciated?

Would this premise be worth testing? How about a Buddhist bloggers' roundtable or panel discussion on different topics related to race, diversity and Buddhism? But the goal would not be to show how someone is wrong or convert others to your viewpoint, it would be to practice what Katie calls "mindful blogging" and do it in the challenging context of a dialogue about race, diversity and Buddhism.  

Sooo... Anybody game? I guess this is somewhat presumptuous since it assumes people are actually reading my ramblings...Is anybody out there?

ps - just in case someone is out there, I want to again acknowledge influence and inspiration from Kloncke and Dangerous Harvests for this line of thought - thanks!

Transformation!

When we look deeply into ourselves,

we see both flowers and garbage...
In the way that a gardener knows how
to transform compost into flowers, we
can learn the art of transforming anger,
depression and racial discrimination
into love and understanding.

Thich Nhat Hanh from: Touching Peace

Satyagraha Special Section: Blueprints of Freedom

How Martin Luther King, Jr., brought satyagraha to the U.S. and revolutionized the civil rights movement.

By Charles Johnson

In Atlanta SCLC office, 1966

FAR FROM THE police dogs, jail cells, and hostile crowds, Martin Luther King, Jr., stands in his office with his arms crossed in front of a portrait of Mohandas Gandhi. The juxtaposition of these two spiritual titans in this photograph reminds me that Gandhi’s “experiment with truth” was at the heart of King’s work for justice and equality. For King as well as Gandhi, the methods of satyagraha, far from being neutral tools devoid of cultural values, contained precise, challenging blueprints for leading a moral life.

King first publicly declared his admiration for the father of modern India during the Montgomery bus boycott, proclaiming, “Christ gave us the goals and Mahatma Gandhi the tactics.” Those tactics were tested in an American context for the first time during King’s fourteen-year career as the nation’s most preeminent minister and Socratic gadfly of the state. King was at a meeting during the Montgomery bus boycott, when segregationists bombed his house. He rushed back and found his wife Coretta and their baby Yolanda unharmed. Outside his damaged home, an angry, armed black crowd confronted the white policemen at the scene. The situation was edging toward violence when King raised one hand to quiet the crowd. “I want you to go home and put down your weapons,” he said. “We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence.… We must meet hate with love.” According to the white policemen there that night, King’s calming words in the heat of racial violence saved their lives. King’s use of skillful means (upaya kushala) brought something uniquely redemptive to the struggle for black liberation in America; he established the actions of the Civil Rights movement as morally superior to those of its opposition. However, King never sought to humiliate his opponents. A practitioner of satyagraha endeavors to respect his opponent, retain him as friend, and provide him with a way to save face during their encounter so that he can maintain his dignity and join the ranks of the enlightened.

The electrifying Birmingham, Alabama campaign, infused with the spirit of satyagraha, brought segregation to its knees. “We shall wear you down by our capacity to suffer,” King announced, merging the passion of Christ and Gandhi’s doctrine in his belief that suffering, loss of property, and even physical pain were worthwhile means to a spiritual end. King and his lieutenants filled the jails with peaceful protesters, children as well as adults. 2,500 demonstrators marched on Birmingham’s streets. Racist Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor responded to the nonviolent protests with fire hoses and police dogs. His actions, captured in news footage and broadcast worldwide, backfired by alerting American citizens and the international community to the horrible conditions faced by black people in the South.

This brutality sickened the Birmingham firemen, too. On May 5, 1963, hundreds of blacks held a prayer meeting near the city jail. Enraged, Connor ordered his firemen to turn on the hoses. But the firemen fell back as if mesmerized, some of them weeping, and allowed the protesters to continue. This remarkable event proved yet again the

power of satyagraha, or “soul force,” in winning over the hearts and minds of one’s opponents. That victory was surely helped by the ten points of the “Commitment Blank,” a kind of activist’s version of the bodhisattva vows, signed by the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and their followers during the Birmingham campaign:

COMMANDMENTS FOR THE VOLUNTEERS

I hereby pledge myself—my person and my body—to the nonviolent movement. Therefore I will keep the following commandments:

Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus.
Remember always that the nonviolent movement seeks justice and reconciliation—not victory.
Walk and talk in the manner of love, for God is love.
Pray daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free.
Sacrifice personal wishes in order that all men might be free.
Observe with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy.
Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world.
Refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.
Strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health.
Follow the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration.

When practicing soul force, activists were urged to work for change in the world and in themselves simultaneously. These “moral experiments” were intended to be performed in their daily lives as scientists might test their theories. Such an approach is in perfect accord with satyagraha’s insistence that it is futile to implement ideas in the public realm if we fail to practice them in our personal lives. Dharma teacher and mendicant monk Claude AnShin Thomas understood this well when he said, “As a Buddhist, I cannot think myself into a new way of living, I have to live myself into a new way of thinking.” If we hope to end war and violence, Thomas noted, “we must simply stop the endless wars that rage within.”

BEFORE HIS DEATH at the age of thirty-nine, King would receive fifty assassination threats and the wrath of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI; live with a $30,000 bounty on his head; be stabbed, stoned, bombed, and repeatedly arrested and jailed. All this only reinforced King’s conviction that “civilization and violence are antithetical concepts.” In a short space of time, King revolutionized the civil rights movement, and his efforts took a heavy personal toll: after his death, an autopsy found that he had the heart of a sixty-year-old man. Although his life, like Gandhi’s, was cut tragically short, his powerful legacy endures. He reminds nonviolent activists that brotherhood is our goal, love our method, generosity and forgiveness our rule. King summarized the principle of satyagraha in language as simple as the purity of the ideal: “Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” King devoted his life to helping Americans be what we ought.

Charles Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle as well as an award-winning author. His most recent book, Mine Eyes Have Seen: Bearing Witness to the Civil Rights Struggle, a collaboration with civil rights photographer Bob Adelman, was published in November 2007.

images: top: © Bob Fitch photo, bottom: © Bettmann/Corbis

 from Tricycle:
http://www.tricycle.com/special-section/satyagraha-special-section-blueprints-freedom?offer=dharma

A Path With Heart chapter 4: Necessary Healing

"True maturation on the spiritual path requires that we discover the depth of our wounds. As Achaan Chah put it, 'If you haven't cried a number of times, your meditation hasn't really begun."

At the end of my first 10 day retreat, before we broke Noble Silence, we were taught metta or lovingkindness. It was if a dam broke. I started crying, at first desperately trying to stop or at least slow it down or do it silently, then was totally overwhelmed as huge wracking sobs repeatedly washed over and through me in waves. The last time I had really cried was as a high school student more than 20 years before that and even then under very difficult circumstances. Since that retreat, I get teared up quite easily... The scene in the Gandhi movie where all the non violent protesters are beaten and massacred... Seeing Martin Luther King, Jr. giving a speech... Hearing about the progress of youth who graduated from the organic farming and life skills program I helped start and still run... But it has been more than just crying. Having spontaneous feelings of metta arise for others come up even in conflict situations... Acknowledging and embracing the heart, feeling the softening and melting, the tenderness and vulnerability of being human... Being present and compassionate for the small moments with one's children... A wonderful and immeasurable blessing!

"Unhealed pain and rage, unhealed traumas from childhood abuse or abandonment, become powerful unconscious forces in our lives. Until we are able to bring awareness and understanding to our old wounds, we find ourselves repeating their patterns of unfulfilled desire, anger, and confusion over and over again."
 
Wounds, pain and rage... I have spent much of my life wounding myself and others... expressing pain and rage... I used to love playing football with ferocity and reckless disregard for bodily health and safety. If there was a cocky white boy playing, I would try and break him. Blocking, hitting, tackling so hard and relentlessly, chasing him all over the field until he would start to avoid me. Sometimes he would fall down as I approached rather than have me tackle. Aggression and domination. It was both euphoric and addicting.

For a period of time I was an honors student in high school. There were very few students of color in these classes. I remember feeling invisible, inadequate and that the other students were smarter and better than me. I remember sitting in class wishing I wasn't Asian, that my skin was not dark, my eyes not slanted, my hair not black and straight. Eventually I started not to care and then even verbally harass and intimidate the other students and then stopped going to classes altogether. I would spend my time with friends vandalizing the school, making and getting into trouble. Outside of school we got into fights, vandalized buildings, parks, offices, "borrowed" cars, broke open tens of parking meters. After a few close calls, we wound up in the police station. My parents were at a dinner party with other Asian American parents who were bragging about their kids' various achievements when the police called them to come get me... At the time I had a bowl cut and the police thought I had fallen in with the wrong crowd and let me go. In one semester I went from honors student to being asked to leave school.

For years, I would throw my sparring partners as hard as I could, sometimes as if I were trying to throw them through the floor. Double leg throws with the other person airborne and then crashing to the floor. Slamming, booming throws from which people would not get up right away or have to stop. I would feel victorious, glad, sick, disgusted and self loathing all at the same time...

"The first area of healing comes when we develop a relationship of trust with a teacher"

One day my martial teacher in the middle of class told me something to the effect that I was afraid of my sparring partner. This was someone that I routinely put a serious hurting on and I couldn't believe it. My friends ribbed me about this and as time went by I continued to dominate and slam this guy around and mentally disregarded what my teacher had told me. Yet a seed was planted. What was fear? And what was its relationship to domination and aggression? Could it be that domination and aggression was a way of covering up and not facing fear? What would be an alternative? Soft throws are not just technically harder since rather than strength they rely more on positioning and timing but also demand we be more open to someone else's energy rather than imposing our own.

Helped by meditation I have started to see the whole process differently. Sparring does not have to be oppositional. Our real opponent is our own fears, desires, egos. But then even these are not our enemies. Awareness of my feelings not necessarily being me and occurring in a larger container. Watching - oh there is ego, there is aggression... Seeing these feelings come and then go without having to engage or manifest them.

Most recently I started to have feelings of care and even tenderness towards my partners. There is an immediacy and intimacy in letting others in, putting yourself in a vulnerable position and letting others throw you. Who throws and who is being thrown? There is joy, grace and interconnectedness in this mutual dance... What a wonderful thing to be alive for! What a wonderful gift! I am thankful to my martial arts teacher, meditation teacher and those who have shared the path with me as fellow seekers, learners and teachers!

May we continue to learn and grow and express our humanness together!

Racial Diversity and Buddhism in the U.S. (2006)

When we speak of Buddhism in the United States, we are speaking of a cultural movement that has brought to this continent ancient Indian, East and Southeast Asian, and Tibetan spiritual teachings and practices. For the first time in history, these teachings have arrived in a land that is racially heterogeneous. At the same time, they are taking root in a society that was founded, by a white majority, on the unwholesome seeds of colonialism, genocide and slavery. In this meeting, the values of community, interdependence, and collaboration come face-to-face with the values of the pursuit of individualism, self-interest and competition. Deep bow meets handshake (1).

With these words, Hilda Guitiérrez Baldoquín, the editor of Dharma, Color, and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism, describes the historical and current diversity of Buddhism in America. In the almost one hundred and fifty year history of Buddhism in the U.S., racial diversity has been an ever-present concern. One of the challenges facing American Buddhism today is the need to fully recognize the experiences of Asian immigrants in the U.S., Asian Americans, European Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, as well as all other people of color who practice Buddhism.

People of color are negotiating spaces within predominantly European American sanghas (Buddhist communities). Buddhist centers across the country are starting to host people of color retreats and meditation groups. These efforts are led by Buddhist teachers of color whose work to reduce the isolation people of color have felt is starting to have an impact. They work in tandem with a handful of organizations for people of color to sustain these efforts beyond just one or two retreats. Additionally, White people active in Buddhist centers are working to understand racism in their own lives and communities. Together, these efforts are attempting to reshape American Buddhism into racially diverse and integrated communities.

This report provides snapshots of the work American Buddhists are doing to nurture racially diverse sanghas—it is not a comprehensive collection of these efforts. The research is based on journal articles, books, email and verbal conversations and interviews with several Buddhists of color in the U.S.

To download the full report as a Word document with hyperlinks, click here.
To download the full report as a .pdf without hyperlinks, click here.

Endnotes:

(1) Baldoquín, Hilda Gutiérrez, ed. Dharma, Color, and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2004: 18.

http://pluralism.org/reports/view/36

Oprah Talks to Thich Nhat Hanh

http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Oprah-Talks-to-Thich-Nhat-Hanh

In the Lineage of Sister Mary

Dharma teacher RALPH STEELE’s journey from speaking Gullah as a child in the South to the teachings of the Pali Canon

http://www.tricycle.com/feature/in-lineage-sister-mary?offer=dharma

Questions For Henry Louis Gates Jr. After the Beer Summit

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14fob-q4-t.html

I like that after all or at least most of the headlines have faded, these two men did get together for more beer...

For me the moral of the story is that decent people can get caught up in extraordinary circumstances that may not bring out the best in us but that there is still time for redemption, reconciliation and more beer...

Although the issues this incident raised were and are still important, fundamentally we are all trying to get by day by day... A little understanding and compassion can carry us a long way...

A Path With Heart chapter 3: Take the One Seat

"Outwardly, it means selecting one practice and one teacher among all of the possibilities, and inwardly, it means having the determination to stick with that practice through whatever difficulties and doubts arise until you have come to true clarity and understanding."

I have been with one martial arts school for 25 years now... and one meditation style for 4 years... I have come to look at these practices as my craft, something to do, put my time in for, day in and day out, not to expect but just keep going. In my martial arts school there is a saying from the first grandmaster. "Jangan yakin akan kemajuan. Harus yakin akan disiplin." Which means don't be sure about advancement. You must be sure about disipline.

This is a difficult thing to do and it seems like the process is never complete. When do you come to true clarity and understanding? There is definitely something there - developing familiarity then intimacy with a practice, dealing with boredom, maxing out and finding a way to go further. But there is also at times frustration, feeling stagnant, doubting, wondering about other paths... And whatever level of advancement or achievement reached brings new doubts, frustration and boredom... I think this is where compassion for oneself is important along with a realization that these feelings are natural and part of the process.

For years I neglected to practice long movements or our equivalent of "kata" seriously. I couldn't see the direct martial application and preferred to spar, practice throwing and evasive blocks. Recently though I have really started to appreciate the poetry and self development aspects of daily polishing long movements. It really does feel like moving meditation. Sometimes I try and cultivate a global awareness and at other times a specific focused concentration. The energy and breath I watch without forcing or striving and see what manifests itself. Sometimes forceful and explosive and others subtle and nuanced. My job is to watch it all unfold. So much beauty, poetry and connection to now. For this I am grateful.     

A Morning Reflection by Rev. Zenju Earthlyn Marselean Manuel

I am not free.  I am not free because I  define myself by the Buddhist robe that was given to me.  I define myself by titles like Reverend or Buddhist.   I define myself by my dark skin color and its history.  I define myself by my sexuality.  I am not free because I am still angry about what has hurt me in life.  I am not free because I want to be important.  I want to be heard.  I am not free because I have spent my life becoming, becoming, becoming.  I am not free because I have completely abandoned my true nature to be prosperous.  So, I have mounted a campaign of freedom for Zenju and for those of us who are trapped like me in the clothes that were given to us.

Everyday from this day forward arouse within the true being.  Be warmed and fed  by fire, cleansed and hydrated by water, touch your feet to the earth, and speak from the bones.  Grandmother says we could be beautiful if we could be true.

These things that we say we are only appear when we cannot see ourselves.  Identification may be necessary for the compartments of our brain but it is not necessary for our freedom.  Who breathes here is identified but goes beyond any identity.  Free Zenju, I say to myself.  Free Zenju. Svaha (and so it is)!

http://zenjuearthlynmanuel.com/

A Path With Heart chapter 2: Stopping the War

“The unawakened mind tends to make war on the things are.”

I feel like this describes most of my life. From elementary school to high school, college, much of life has been spent doing just that – making war on the way things are. Rejection, aversion, rebellion, avoidance, but not a lot of acceptance much less wisdom. It’s the same plot with predictably unsatisfactory ending but with different characters, lines and locations.

“The purpose of a spiritual discipline is to give us a way to stop the war, not by our force of will, but organically through gradual training.”

Along with the war, this process of gradual training has been there too. Reading, looking to Taoism, Henry David Thoreau, MLK, Malcolm X, Gandhi and alternative education in high school seemed to be part of an innate process which has all been part of the path. But this was in the mind and part of the ongoing war was the contradiction between what the mind knew to be good and right and what manifested through the body and actions. This contradiction has often been very painful.

“When we let go of our battles and open our hearts to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice.”

Meditation can be a microcosm of this war. The physical pain of sitting, boredom, wanting to do something else, be something or somewhere else, conflicting emotions, memories, and thoughts all do war with the way things are.

“To stop the war and come into the present is to discover a greatness of our own heart that can include the happiness of all beings as inseparable from our own. When we let ourselves feel the fear, the discontent, the difficulties we have always avoided, our heart softens”

Goenkaji often says “Accept things as they are, not as you want them to be.”

It’s a saying that comes back over and over usually when I am not accepting things as they are but rather hoping they’ll be as I want them…

Listening to this, realizing what is going on but without reproach, brings about some softening, melting in the body, in the heart and at times even in action.

“As we allow the world to touch us deeply, we recognize that just as there is pain in our own lives, so there is pain in everyone else’s life.”

Yes, how true. Can we use our own pain as a gate to understanding and offering compassion to others? Perhaps at the start this is silent and from afar but with time, aspiration and more melting, this becomes action however modest.