Reflections

Below is my response to Brad Warner who posed the above question in a recent blog post he published on his website, Hardcore Zen : Brad, Thank you for clarifying your position in response to Adam Fisher.    Of course the onus for abuse lies on the teacher and not on the student.    You say, “I don’t blame the victim” while you claim that “blind obedience” is the culprit.   But who obeys?   It still sounds like you are pointing to the student.   Moreover, in all these cases of abuse, even when itcomes to Sasaki or Shimano, nobody ever issued an “order” to which anybody ever “obeyed”.    Brad, are you sure that the student’s (pathological) obedience to the teacher is the issue, as opposed to the teacher’s abuse of the student’s (healthy) trust?   Even your well-meaning piece of advice “Be careful out there,” while probably intended to empower students, makes it look like you think that the abuse of authority is due to s...

In two recent essays[1], Glenn Wallis, author of the controversial blog Speculative Non-Buddhism, takes issue with the notion of “empathic resonance”, particularly when the existence of “mirror neurons” is submitted as evidence for the ability to “feel another’s pain”.  Glenn criticizes this notion, especially as it has been co-opted by influential Buddhist figures, because he finds that it perpetuates human bondage in sad contradiction to Buddhism’s own “emancipatory teachings”. Glenn claims that, to be more consistent with classical Buddhist teaching, the notion of "empathic resonance” needs to be replaced with a notion that is more interactive, one that would account for our responses to each other on the basis of reactions to gesture, facial expression and language, rather than on the basis of an inert “reactivity” that bypasses human agency. The purpose of this response is not to deal with Glenn’s exploration of empathy as it pertains to what he calls x-Buddhism, bu...

As the spider moves along the thread, as small sparks come forth from the fire, even so from this Self come forth all breaths, all worlds, all divinities, all beings. ~ Upanishad By God I mean an absolutely infinite Being, that is, a substance consisting of an infinite number of attributes each of which expresses an eternal and infinite essence. ~ Spinoza; Ethics I Def. 6 Nondualism, one of the foundational tenets of Buddhism, is a philosophy of no-difference, i.e. one that holds there is no substantial difference between conceptually polarized opposites such as the transcendent and the immanent, the absolute and the relative, essences and appearances, subject and object, etc.    Individuals are conceptual abstractions, only as separate from Unity as waves are from the ocean rearing up from its unique and indivisible whole. There is no transcendent or absolute Being or Truth in a genuinely nondualistic ontology; hence the godlessness of Buddhism that s...

In some families, please is described as the magic word.   In our house, however, it was sorry.   ~Margaret Laurence Etymologically, to be “sorry” is to be filled with sorrow or pain, from the Old Frisian word for pain, sar .   “I am sorry” is said to express sorrow about any state of affairs that causes grief or upset- from a tragic situation that deeply distresses myself or others to one that merely causes a passing discomfort.   I can be sorry that so many people died in the earthquake as well as sorry that it’s raining outside.   Because it is only as deep or superficial as the feeling it triggers, the degree to which we feel sorrow can vary considerably from person to person and situation to situation.   An expression of sorrow is also used to convey sympathy or compassion.   In times of suffering, saying “I’m sorry” is sometimes the only thing we can offer by way of an empathic response to another person’s distress. ...

The "subject" is not something given,  it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is. ~ Nietzsche;  The Will to Power I am beginning to think that anatta (no self) is an invention of the narcissistic mind; and that sesshins, retreats, caves and monasteries are all unnecessary prisons in which to figure out, in a breathtaking breakthrough moment (arguably deserving of the title “kensho”, awakening or enlightenment) that it’s not about me.    The saying goes “great doubt great awakening”.  But maybe that's only if you've got a great ego to begin with.  There is a story about a peasant woman making a long trek to see Huineng (I think) so she can ask him one very simple question.  When he answers her, she is awakened, says thank you, and walks away.  Small ego, small awakening.   Nothing to write home about.    T hose who are the most blown away by what they discover at the heart of the...

Any object you have in your mind, however good, will be a barrier between you and the inmost Truth ~Meister Eckhart     My faith had been unwavering for over three years.   It was a faith without object, purpose or design that had erupted laughing at its own undisclosed secret, a word that finally sprang to my lips with nothing whatsoever to say.    Still it oriented to the mystery of my own existence, a gentle “yes”, clear and present down to the depths of unknowing, from which it presumably came. At first I celebrated it like a newborn baby, marveling at this wonder of wonders that had alit with such grace into my world.   But over time I learned that it did not depend on me for survival, and would just casually touch into it from time to time with a furtive glance from my heart’s eye.    Then, one day, I lost it.    I panicked like a mother waking up in the middle of the night searching madly for her baby under...