Buddhism

rinpoche is reknowned for presenting the essentials of buddhism in a palatable way that makes sense to westerners. this is the book i started with, and i still refer to it all the time as a reference. he also founded the rigpa organization in the u.s.a. (www.rigpa.org).

i get the impression they went out of fashion in the 70s, perhaps not new age-y enough => my copy of his book abt zen has a hilarious cartoon of the bodidharma on the cover (grumpy old indian monk who went to china and invented a. zen and b. martial arts)

i also like "optimism is a political choice" but that may not have quite the same valence for you

always thought "hell is practice, not punishment" was good and buddhism sounding but i suspect it's just a bumpersticker.

Buddhism - a religion based on psychology?

nah

Reducing religion to psychology =eternally dud

The Church of the Eternal Dud

I like it

I just wanted to bring up Buddhism to discuss became I have been interested in it lately. More philosophical Buddhism than faith-based Buddhism. Growing up at a Catholic it seems strange to have a spirituality based on mindfullness instead of guilt.

Check out Thomas Merton - a Catholic monk who was into zen

Reducing non-western culture to western paradigms - also dud

100% to Thomas Merton. An absolute master. His books “thoughts in solitude” is a classic, short form meditations, everyone should read it.

I have been interested in Paul F Knitter. The latter half of this interview gives a simple overview of him I think

https://honeylocustsangha.weebly.com/paul-knitter.html

xp otm

How Thomas Merton checked out is itself a matter of some controversy [In 2018, Hugh Turley and David Martin published The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, questioning the theory of accidental electrocution]

"Reducing non-western culture to western paradigms - also dud" I've been wondering if the terms in English that are used to describe things like Duḥkha in the way intended or if they just make people think kof them in unintended ways.
I have heard people say you can be Buddhist and Christian at the same time which seems odd to me.
Personally I am not Buddhist but i play one on TV.
Most of my info has come from Kung Fu movies in which Lamas are always sayingthings like "Buddhas name be praised! " And remaining calm while the template is under attack

LG, check out this episode of weird studies about dogen zenji: https://www.weirdstudies.com/16

I won’t pretend to know too much about Buddhism, but what I do know doesn’t seem heterodox to Christianity. Did not know that about Merton Luna, thanks for the rabbit hole

THanks for the links.

I think many bible thumping fire and brimstone type CHristians would call you a heretic for being Buddhist.
Of course you can always just say you are a philosopher and just happen to agree with the philosophies of certain Bhoddisatvas

I understand his (Merton's) body was returned to the U.S. on a plane full of U.S. servicemen's bodies being flown home from Vietnam

"Mindfulness is said to be a $4bn industry. More than 60,000 books for sale on Amazon have a variant of "mindfulness" in their title, touting the benefits of Mindful Parenting, Mindful Eating, Mindful Teaching, Mindful Therapy, Mindful Leadership, Mindful Finance, a Mindful Nation, and Mindful Dog Owners, to name just a few."

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/14/the-mindfulness-conspiracy-capitalist-spirituality

massive xps to latham's 1st post of this revive:

when your central practice is awareness, you observe myriad manifestations of mind in the process, so that, as a byproduct of awareness, buddhism has accumulated a lot of psychological savvy. but buddhism isn't 'based on' psychology. to the extent it engages with psychology, it's to set it aside.

Thank goodness thumping brimstones don’t ontologically define Christianity then.
I’ve always been skeptical of western variants of Buddhism (emphasis on western) for the manipulative capitalist underpinnings sometimes expressed (as linked above). But no religion is exempt from this in the west

Good post aimless

Merton wormhole led me to this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayings_of_the_Desert_Fathers

Must be from the bootleg Bible

Desert fathers are great. No bible, the desert fathers are 100’s of years after “biblical times”

massive xps to latham's 1st post of this revive:

when your central practice is awareness, you observe myriad manifestations of mind in the process, so that, as a byproduct of awareness, buddhism has accumulated a lot of psychological savvy. but buddhism isn't 'based on' psychology. to the extent it engages with psychology, it's to set it aside.

Feel like that Guardian writer is making it seem that Miles Neale is calling out Jon Kabat-Zinn as being a kind of Ray Kroc of mindfulness when it is the Guardian writer who is borrowing the term from Neale and doing the finger-pointing.

Ah, this is interesting. The author of that article wrote a whole book about McMindfulness and Jon Kabat-Zinn responded.
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/49108

As far I can tell from Neale's webpage he has no, um, beef, with J K-Z. Here is something interesting I found there, where he talks about the relationship between meditation and psychotherapy, in particular the concept of spiritual bypass: http://embodied.bestdevserver.com/buddhism/self-care-and-selflessness-a-contradiction/

that piece seems pretty sound to me

I've had some minor engagement with the mindfulness industry - it seems to be a curate's egg with the potential to become something much worse - there are ways in which it seems much more appealing than psychotherapy and some of the techniques seem to help a lot but I'm profoundly ambivalent about it and the things it seems to emphasise and downplay. the disavowals of self-help can be about as convincing as "it's not a diet" - and many people involved seem to be cagey or downright dismissive about concepts like karma and reincarnation (or feel the need to translate them into scientific materialist language) and you can forget about god(s) and other beings in other realms* - it's being marketed as more scientific and pragmatic than TM and other new age stuff but also as more authentically buddhist and there is constant equivocation between mindfulness and buddhism as such - *maybe you get more into all that stuff as you go deeper but then it all sounds a bit culty

I'm not suggesting there is or was ever a true version of buddhism somewhere in asia unsullied by western nonsense (although that's a great hook for people selling their own takes on it) but stripmining a religion for its most instrumentally or therapeutically appealing parts and then claiming to be holding the true flame is a weird thing to do (it's a bit like how nietzche and schopenhauer and all them claimed their versions of nihilism were more authentically buddhist than the buddhists). that isn't to say that many of the techniques don't work quite well as advertised so I'm deeply conflicted about it all

There are a bunch of different takes on this other than "haha this is just the latest brand of Orientalist mumbo jumbo!" There are Secular Buddhists like Stephen Batchelor, then there is someone like Evan Thompson, author of Why I Am Not a Buddhist, to take two examples off the top of my mindhead.

The Man can't bust our mindfulness.

Pop Dharma

I guess the only thing I have to add is that these questions - is X too individualistic (the concept of "spiritual materialism" is relevant here also), is Y beneficial or is this spiritual bypassing - never go away, and people that consider themselves Buddhist (hi) keep asking them.

am I correct in my impression that karma is much less central to western buddhism (and spirituality in general) than say 50 years ago? if so is there an obvious explanation for this?

and *why* is it that so many western buddhists and mindfulness advocates are so weird (almost embarrassed) about reincarnation? it sounds too religiony? are they ashamed of believing or not believing in it?

There is some dancind and tiptoing around that I have never even gotten near to so I don't have much to say.

Dancind and tiptoing = the Buddha's reindeer.

Hahaha!

But do you recall
The greatest bodhisattva of all?

lol

this dude seems pretty hardcore:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9W4SUepWOQ

it's one path, but it's not a requirement

A few years ago I read this book with the perhaps cheesy title of Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, by Paul F. Knitter. One thing I remember about it is that he seemed to make an interesting argument for why certain things could be meaningful even if one did not believe in reincarnation or any kind of afterlife at all.

I also came to the conclusion at some point that Aimless’s screenname was derived from Buddhism but I don’t know if he is cool with me saying that.

my screen name's buddhist derivation is quite indirect and was mostly unconscious when it happened, but I've kept it over the decades largely to honor those hidden roots. it's ok to peg it to that.

Ever since 1978 or so I've had a hard time deciding whether I'm a bad taoist or an easily sidetracked buddhist, so I oscillate between them, depending on which is easiest to impersonate.

bad taoist = several old roommates of mine

Why wash the dishes piling up in the sink? Let the water flow around them

That reminds me the terrible book Zen Guitar for Assholes where the guy recommends doing everything “100%, all out, all the time” or something like that, including doing the dishes. Not realizing that maybe, just maybe such a white knuckle attitude might actually lead somebody to think “Right now I don’t really feel like I can the dishes 100% so I will postpone that task until I feel up to it” instead of some more, say, self-aware approaches to handling the task with minimum wear and tear on the psyche.

"Reducing non-western culture to western paradigms - also dud" I've been wondering if the terms in English that are used to describe things like Duḥkha in the way intended or if they just make people think kof them in unintended ways.

You should totally check out this article by Carine Defoort:Is There Such A Thing As Chinese Philosophy?

Link is to a pdf file

Today’s Daily Dharma is apropos.
https://tricycle.org/magazine/special-transmission/

I guess philosophy is philosophy and even that doesnt exist

thx for that link, from the chan/zen-zone

Sure. That was intense.