Perfectly said Brad. My immediate interpretation is "don't get hung up on what you want." Preferences are the armor we use for our personality complexes but these too are idols to smash! Unviolently but with a swift dharma sword ;)
Avoiding picking & choosing is equivalent to relinquishing one’s desire, as in the Third Noble Truth: By ceasing desire one ends dukkha (suffering). Desire gives rise to clinging & grasping onto things, which also obstructs our Buddha Nature. Picking & choosing are also indicative of one’s biases.
Thanks! It's a re-painting of the band's original artwork from the 80s. A guy named Vince Packard did it way back then and re-did it more recently. The old version wasn't in color.
Had been reading the poem over for a few days now, wonderful coincidence to hear you speak on it, and I appreciate your reading from Dogen, a breath of clarity as always. Thank you for these videos!
Let it be. Allow this to be. Accept this for what this is. Because there is nothing else. This is what there is. If you think about it, it's kinda funny how you obsess about something other than what you have here and now, something that's not real. And if you do obsess and do something to change the things you don't like, accept this too. You cannot fail, because it's not about failing or succeeding.
Chi chi's!! Growing up in Sandusky I remember going there for my birthday. They'd make me wear a sombrero while the entire wait staff would sing. Good times!
The translation of you mentioned is found in Samaneri Jayasara’s reading on her RU-vid channel. The wording may be very slightly different, but if I remember correctly, it comes very close.
I appreciated your comments about privilege and identity. It seems that an issue with current society is that we believe in vague notions of freedom, while not having a clear sense of who or what we really are. "I'm that!", or more often "I'm *not* that!" Some old Persian writer (sorry I can't remember who) said, "Real freedom means to have no choice", which has been blowing my mind for a couple of decades.
that's really interesting. it's the reason I am scared to live in a monastery. i don't care about ice cream flavours or hyper specific lattes. but I can't seem to give up grabbing a snack from my fridge whenever i feel like it, or putting music on when I want or watching a movie whenever. but also - doing these things never fully add up to feeling content either. should I pretend my apartment is a monastery and not just access w/e I feel like as desires come up?
You could try that. Living in a monastery means subjecting yourself to an authoritarian system that you believe will help you in some way. Shunryu Suzuki called it "self caught prison." In many ways it is like a prison. But it's a prison you enter into voluntarily. Also, it's not as nasty as a prison -- mainly because everyone who is in it has chosen to be there.
If you had to pick just one, would you choose Bad Brains or Minor Threat? Greetings from France , I've just finished reading "Shut up and sit dow" and, despite the translation, I really liked it.
Minor Threat. But only because they're sort of nostalgic to me. When I was younger I didn't listen to Bad Brains. There was no reason why. I probably just didn't get exposed to them at that age. But I had a friend who owned one of the Minor Threat EPs and we used to listen to it a lot. It was the first hardcore punk I ever heard.
There is an expression in Hungarian that applies to people that cannot ever be satisfied. You say, "for some people even shit is tasteless". Made me think of that. But - serious note, the stoics say "Amor Fati" - Love fate.
What perplexes me is there is this practice that involves sitting there without doing anything in particular except to maintain a certain posture. Then there's this whole philosophy bit that presents various interesting ideas, some make sense and some seem a bit bonkers and some are somewhere in-between. The relationship between the practice and the philosophy bits osnt entirely clear. Like if i did Zazen and predefrred reading Wittgenstein to Dogen, would that be any different in essence?
Happy Belated Birthday, Brad! Question: is 5 or 10 minutes Zazen "good for nothing" (lol), if that's all the time I really have? How did you choose a specific amount of time? What is to little, or to much? Best to the you, the wife, and Ziggy!
I think it was Huang Po who said, “Do not seek the truth, only cease to cherish opinions.” Also, Full Tilt Ice Cream has a great Ube (which I always think of as ‘taro’ because of Hawaii) ice cream which I always enjoy.
I was in Belgium a few years ago and came across a Chi Chi's restaurant. They had the same logo as the one I remember. I didn't get a chance to eat there, though.
With not choosing you have already chosen, and what about your preference - you have no preference, that's your preference. Just feel, and sit with it.
since you mention Terebess, I want to ask a question that has been on my mind for about 3 years now. If someone steals books on Buddhism and Zen, would that action consequence somehow prevent someone from getting enlightened or would his zazen "not work"? After writing I can almost hear your replies. "There is no such thing as enlightenment, and zazen is a no goal practice." So I rephrase the question: according to the laws of cause and effect, won't there be any effect if I steal and read books from Terebess? I can sense it is not okay to do that, but why is it not okay? I was born into a Muslim family and stealing has its punishment in the hereafter. If you could make a video on how to think about it from a Zen perspective.
I don't believe there is any punishment for reading books from Terebess. But there is some sort of karmic effect. It's probably not a very big karmic effect (I would guess). Also, a lot of the books on Terebess are nearly impossible to find anywhere else. I am personally annoyed that MY books are on Terebess because my books are easily available and quite cheap. I probably lose some income because of that. But I don't lose much. The fact that my books are on Terebess probably means I earn around $10 less each year than I would otherwise. For other authors the effect would be about the same, I think.
Brad, i understand that this could be a thorny topic, but would you be open to discussing transgender/nonbinary/gender non-conforming identities within the context of Soto Zen?
I wrote an article about it on my blog (hardcore zen.info). There is not a whole lot to say about the subject. It's a kind of delusion, obviously. But, then again, pretty much every way of approaching secular life is delusional. If people want to live that way and they don't push it on people who don't want to live that way, it's not a big societal problem. If one entered a traditional Soto Zen Buddhist monastery it could be an issue, I suppose. But it would only be an issue if one insisted upon displaying one's identity as transgender/nonbinary/gender non-conforming. If one did not insist on that, it would just be another delusion to work on.
