"Buddha Nature"? Know Thyself!

Laura Murphy, Jordan Kramer (Against the Stream); Seven (Wisdom Quarterly)
What is our true nature or Siddhartha's for that matter? (Indiaaa.../Flickr.com).

Ever try to define your "true" nature? Can it differ in different contexts? If success is more lasting when it follows our natures, why do so many desert their talents?

I am? I am that I am? I'm basically good, naturally bad? These are the questions I ask.

Pema Chodron (Tibetan nun) on "Basic Goodness"

Then there is the issue of identity, I am...what? What is there to identify with? These passing mental states, this body, these feelings?

Descartes famously misspoke, "I think therefore I am." Surely, based on the evidence, all that could really be said as a foundational truth was "There's thinking so there's thinking."

Something's thinking, but it does not follow that it is some permanent, perfect, unchanging self. "Self" changes. It changes at every moment. It can identify with anything. What is it? The Buddha defined it as "materiality and mentality" or "form (body), feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness."

These are the Five Aggregates of Clinging. They cling to one another, and illusion clings to them. They are empty and impersonal in an ultimate sense.

In a conventional sense, here "I am" questioning what is "I," who is "self," what have I been, what will I be? The questions of fools who go on revolving in rebirth and suffering. Renewed becoming depends on this confusion. Rather than being mindful and fearlessly looking at the truth AND THEREBY BEING LIBERATED, we assume the answer and ponder in a hopeless circle.

Siddhartha sat in spite of all the inimical forces that it upset (WTPille/Flickr.com).

To be fully oneself, to embody one's potential, to utilize the talents brought over from countless past lives (or given as "gifts" at birth for no reason), to cultivate skills, to move beyond personal suffering and self-esteem issues... are a few angles to investigate.

To fathom the enigma of my "true" nature -- as Christian evil and fallen, or as essentially good with the potential to be a buddha -- is something any ancient Greek could agree on: KNOW THYSELF.

Watchers of Gilligan's Island already know, "To thine own self be true." That is important. But is that enough. What is the self "I am" being true to?

(ambergristoday.com)

The historical Buddha warned: Thinking won't get you there. If it did, he would have advocated philosophy and debating, voting for truthiness and creating consensus realities. There is a Truth beyond all that. And it is accessible. And the Buddha pointed the way. The pointer is not the way anymore than the reflection of the Moon is the Moon.

We talk about Truth. But Buddhism is a practice, not a dogma, not something to believe. "Come and see. Investigate," the Buddha bid others. You need not take anyone's word for it. "Relying on no one, depending on no other's truth, you will see." The Truth shall set us free.

Of course in our culture, this was hijacked. That famous Bible character became that Truth, that way, that beacon of light. Was that copied from the Buddha's title as the "Light of Asia"? The Buddha did not seek glory. The Truth cannot be hidden forever, whoever found it, rediscovered it, or pointed to it.

If only Western mystics had a way, a step by step way.

All thinking, none knowing
All speaking, none showing
All searching, none finding
Traveling roads that go on winding.
Seven (half remembered words scrawled on a philosophy class desk)

JORDAN: The Buddha never said the words, "Buddha Nature." Where did he say we are naturally or basically good? Before one again starts a sentence "I am...," it might be better to rephrase it: "For right now, it is this way..."

The mind is confused. The mind confuses. The mind, to keep itself a going concern, delights in illusion. It deceives itself. It drags us to suffering. And all the while that seems the thing it dreads. But there it is, standing in the way of Truth and freedom.

SEVEN: You know that saying, "If someone's in your way, and you kick him/her as hard as you can, your butt is going to hurt"? I identify with mind, which is changing at every moment, and stand in my own way. Maybe if I just was rather than imagining "I am this, I am that, I was this, I will be that," maybe if I followed the Buddha's advice and pondered four useful things, I could be free of all suffering.

LAURA: The solutions I come to are based on a thinking mind, which confuses me time and time again. Probably the best way to know is to go inward and experience the luminosity from within -- shining without, and actually see it and feel it, rather than thinking about it. I must pay close attention to this luminous expression, how it feels in my body, in all of my interactions with others, my actions and habits in day to day life. I think that's when -- well, there I go again!

I start to get a deeper understanding beyond mental discernment. It takes repetition -- catching the mind/myself/the Thinker is being mindful -- before this inner knowing starts to make sense, before it can be trusted, before I know that my very being is rooted in life and everyone and everything just as a tree is far larger when the roots are revealed.

It is so easy to become distracted, to forget, to lose direction, to fall off the wagon or get carried away. But I am learning to true my wheel, which can be as simple as coming back to my breath. That is the first and maybe only step in reevaluating my true nature.

I may be uprooted at times, which happens even to the healthiest of trees, so one aspect of my nature is impermanence. In the breath my true nature is revealed, and in feeling the unsatisfactory nature, in mind the impersonal nature... and in nirvana the boundless liberation free of all impermanence, suffering, and delusion.

(Dan Vetree/GR8quotes)

"Morality Without God" (video)

Amber Dorrian, Seven, Nguyen (Wisdom Quarterly); art by Mystic Politics
(TheThinkingAtheist)

Atheists often hear the question, "How can you be moral without God?" The real question is, "How can a moral person accept God?" If Judeo-Christian scriptures are true, "God" is a terrible example of morality or basic goodness.

The "God" Idea

Wisdom Quarterly
Of course, this behavior makes more sense when those scriptures are read more carefully and not limited to Christian and Jewish traditions: "God" is always plural and referring to entities from space claiming dominion, or claiming to have "created" (genetically manipulated) the human race and animals, terra-forming the Earth, making the stars, keeping the Sun alight...

Ancient Indus River Valley Civilization information (now embodied in Hinduism's Vedas), Sumerian and Egyptian texts, and channeled communications all point to many visitors over many aeons. Buddhism inherited ancient "Indian" and Central Asian (Near Eastern) traditions, and the same themes are present often with more detail.

Recovered Nag Hammadi Library (Gnostic Gospels) and Dead Sea Scroll texts, however, means one need not go too far afield to begin to understand that the world has been misled about the meaning of "God." And each theistic tradition simply claims, not the physical actors who reveal themselves on Earth in "chariots of fire" from time to time, but the ONE, godhead, non-duality, oneness, Brahman, unity, matrix, the enduring reality behind the illusion of the universe.

Why would one nation impose its imperial will while claiming to be helping and serving a biblical character? Probably because its population buys this story war after war.

We can safely say that that ONE is not doing all of this killing, warring, razing, raping, boasting, and acting all enraged all the time. Let us follow our hearts and keep our heads. We are responsible for ourselves -- everyone, even "God" -- so it is best to tune in rather than drop out. Our karma, choices, pernicious beliefs, and efforts are our own. We can share them with others, but their karma, choices, beliefs, and efforts are their own.

While we can certainly help each other, no one can save another. Famous spiritual teachers made great efforts to help, not to do everything for us. We are responsible for our greed/bias, hate/fear, and delusion/wrong views; we will bear the results of actions motivated by them.

It is our job to love, to be just, to be peaceful, to be kind, and help one another. Whatever tradition it pleases one to adopt, the bottom line is asking, Is this helping? Living in a religiously oppressive society can make atheism, "science," Satanism (whatever we may conceive of as the Dark Side), or even materialism/hedonism seem like a very attractive option. And it leads us to co-create the world we personally live in.

(Mysticpolitics/Flickr)

Karma, Karma (explained)

Seven, Pa Auk Sayadaw, Bhikkhu Bodhi (Wisdom Quarterly)

The seeds of deeds are in other deeds. From a world to a world, we are led to a world. Mind precedes all states. Mind is their forerunner. From a word to a word, from a deed to a deed, we go on reaping. Every moment holds the possibility for realization/liberation. But with this rare opportunity to awaken, mostly we prefer to go on suffering.

Karma (intentional action capable of yielding results in the future) is very misunderstood. What we do in one life affects us in others. If people refuse to entertain the possibility of having lived countless lives, they are forced to explain everything within one life. We know "what goes around comes around."

But we insist that we know everything that went around in our lives. And most of us claim we are not responsible for anything before the age of 7 (the age of responsibility in various spiritual traditions) or 18 (or whenever society says adulthood begins). This is clearly nonsense.

We do not know what we have done. We are not a single "I." The person who was before is not now, yet the results keep coming. We ask no questions when what comes is pleasant and pleasurable. But whenever it is unpleasant, hard to bear, or terribly painful, we cry foul! We say there is NO reason for it simply we do not know the reason and cannot deduce it from our memory or understanding of how things SHOULD be.

Most motivations are mixed, and karmic results are convoluted.

Karma Works in Mysterious Ways
Things are not as we think they "should" be. And all the world is unfair. But it is fair, in a sense. It plays out according to laws, axioms, regularities. It is orderly in the grand scheme. (It seems terribly disordered in the short term however). If we develop serenity (samatha), absorption (jhana), and mindful-insight (vipassana) we can KNOW and SEE it (karma playing out in an orderly way) for ourselves.

It is directly visible, and always has been, to the uncontaminated mind. Depending on no one and nothing but our own direct knowledge, we can verify that karma as the Buddha explained it (which is quite different than the Vedic brahmin yogis were explaining it or how Hinduism and other traditions now try to explain it) is true. It is amazing.

It works in "mysterious ways" and most of the world simply attributes this "mysterious" force to God. God works in mysterious ways, they say. The God is inscrutable. This is no explanation, but it satisfies the need to know, like the "God of the Gap" atheists decry. Karma is imponderable in detail, but it is very ponderable, very knowable in individual instances. What one deed will go on to cause and be the effect of, that gets very complicated.

The trajectory of a deed (karma) -- what it goes on to cause, contribute to, or serve as a condition for -- is as complex and unpredictable as this neutrino track.

Secret to Abundant Happiness
If we want good (welcome, longed for, pleasant experiences) now and in the future, the motivations of our actions will be rooted in these broad categories: nongreed, nonaversion/nonfear, and nondelusion.

• These words should not be clung to or debated as to their English meaning because they are simply approximations of the ancient Pali/Sanskrit Buddhist terms alobha, adosa/abhava, and amoha.
  

There is no need to fool ourselves and say our motivations are good. Karma knows. There is no fooling karma anymore than fooling "God" in a monotheistic tradition.

Is that amazing? Then this should be more amazing. There is no suffering (dukkha, the range of unpleasant sensation ranging from agitation to agony) that is not rooted in craving, aversion/fear, delusion. Bringing these to an end is called realizing nirvana (the end of all suffering).

• Workings of Karma (paauk.org)
• The Law of Karma (panel discussion)
• The Buddha taught that because of karma beings are bound to the ever-turning wheel of rebirth. Only when a person stops [clinging to the deeply held belief in] the existence of a permanent and [independent] self can he or she become free from karma. Westerners often have trouble with this doctrine, for although they can easily believe that selfishness or ego-clinging causes suffering, it is harder to accept the existence of an invisible system of moral causality called karma. Likewise, since the dawn of the Christian era few Westerners have taken seriously the idea of many lifetimes, even though it was present in Pythagoras and some of Plato [and in original Christian doctrine and Shakespeare]. The word "karma" literally means "action." It is cognate with the most ordinary Sanskrit words for "to make" or "to do." ...And there is the famous Hindu practice of seeking liberation through selfless work, which is called karmayoga -- the yoga of activity.

Russian and American patriotism (video)

Joe Bendel (Libertas Film Magazine)

Russians were apparently better 1950's style all-American US patriots.

Even though he was badly hung-over, he knew there was a national crisis. Though the bleary-eyed Russian did not know at the time the hard line Communist coup had deposed Mikhail Gorbachev, he saw that Swan Lake was the only program on television. For some reason, the Soviets always broadcasted the Tchaikovsky ballet during periods of internal turmoil. It is telling details like this that connect the personal to the grandly historical in Robin Hessman’s My Perestroika, which screened earlier this year at New Directors/New Films.

A Russophile in high school, Hessman was working for LENFILM, the Soviet film agency based in what was then Leningrad, at the time of the infamous coup. Through her time working and studying in Russia, Hessman developed a keen appreciation for the stoic nobility of average Russian citizens, which is clearly reflected in Perestroika. Using five former classmates as representative everymen, Hessman subjectively presents the last 40-some years of Russian and Soviet history through their reminiscences and home movies. More

Hating Osama only begets hate (MLK quote)

Wisdom Quarterly

Put away the blood lust fists, pack the flags of nationalism. All life is precious, and a life has been taken. That loss makes the heart heavy. Those who call for hate suffer in fear.

Martin Luther King Jr. followed the example of Gandhi, who followed the example of Jesus and the Buddha centuries before Christ. The Buddha taught in the "The Imprints of the Dharma" (Dhammapada) that hate always begets hate. Only love conquers hate. This is a timeless truth.

The word hate is a translation of a much broader Buddhist term. Whereas in English hate refers exclusively to passionate anger, in Buddhism the term spans the entire range from slight annoyance to enduring resentment to violent wrath. Counterintuitively, it includes fear. In fear we kill, not out of bravery. Hate is an all-around terrible thing to cultivate.


Jessica Dovey recently became Internet-famous yesterday for confounding two quotes, her own and MLK's. She wisely said:

• “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”

This, of course, is not the only thing the Buddha had to say about "hate." Hatred, or dosa in the exclusively Buddhist language Pali, is one of the three poisons that corrupt the heart/mind. Along with craving and delusion, hatred is sometimes compared to the flaring up of fire, craving to smoldering embers, and delusion to smoke.

Actions motivated by any of these three roots are invariably unskillful, unprofitable, unwholesome karma.

"Actions" (karma) may simply be mental. They may grow into words. They find their ultimate expression in deeds. Even when they remain as thoughts or impulses, they have volition and condition an unpleasant, unwelcome result.

To march in support of killing, to delight in the death of someone, to call for the death of someone, or to rejoice in that death -- all of these are unskillful acts that ripen in suffering for the doer. They are doubly harmful when they become verbal or physical because they then are influencing others to hate. By love alone does hate subside. There is no need to "drive out" darkness; it is enough to bring in light.


MLK was echoing these sentiments when he eloquently stated in the stirring voice of a Southern preacher:

• "Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction…. The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation."

Martin Luther King Jr. with Buddhist monk and Vietnam War dissident, Thich Nhat Hanh