June 28, 2009 by arunlikhati
All the windows closed and the fan turned on, I tried getting to sleep. Then I heard that high frequency humming of a mosquito in my ear, and now I’m up again. This usually isn’t a problem I have in California.
When I was younger in Paris, mosquitos would fly in whenever I left the window open. I’d hear that sharp insistent buzzing by my ear, swipe at the air and roll over. But it would always come back. Never mind the precepts, it was tempting to catch and kill the bug. But my uncle had placed a statue of Guan Yin over the bed, and that was double the reason to not send the sucker onto a better life.
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Posted in Meditation | Tagged karma, Meditation, mosquito | 5 Comments »
June 22, 2009 by arunlikhati
Posted in Sangha | Tagged dhutanga | 2 Comments »
June 21, 2009 by arunlikhati
“What did you call me?”
Two friends of mine are going to be ordained soon, and this has got me thinking about how we address monks and nuns in English. We tend to use the term that the monastics themselves use. Sometimes we have to ask, but we increasingly often encounter titles in books, magazine bylines and on the web. This post explores the sorts of monastic titles that I use when I speak or write about monks and nuns in English to English speakers. And I add a couple thoughts about “Western Buddhism” to boot!
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Posted in Sangha | Tagged acarya, ajaan, ajahn, ashin, bhante, bhikkhu, bhikshu, sayadaw, thầy, venerable | 8 Comments »
I have posted about this topic before. Scott Mitchell from
the buddha is my dj recently posted his wonderfully paper on “Buddhism, pop-culture, and the homogenization of the Dharma”. Read it
here. I’m so glad that scholars are addressing this issue from an academic standpoint. It is something so important for the development of Buddhism in America and yet, something that is also overlooked and rarely questioned. I’ve noticed that the commodification of Buddhism and Buddhist images happens quite a lot in Western culture and every chance I get, I take a picture of it with my phone. Here are some examples of Buddhism being used out-of-context, used by non-Buddhists for non-Buddhist means. You can find more of the dharma in pop culture on
The Worst Horse, a blog dedicated to posting about what they like to call “Dharma-burgers”.
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Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
June 16, 2009 by arunlikhati
The five precepts were my first exposure to Buddhist virtue. I was pretty impressed that there were only five: refrain from taking life, from taking what has not been given, from sexual misconduct, from speaking falsely and from consuming intoxicating substances. And to boot, they weren’t hard and fast rules — at the very least, breaking a precept didn’t mean that I’d missed out on my chance for enlightenment. The precepts were simple and clear without being constrictive.
A leader to a Shambhala SunSpace post yesterday caught my eye: “But, says Zachary Bremmer, clinging to the five precepts as law can cause more suffering than it prevents.” He goes on to analogize the five precepts to training wheels.
Situations will come up in which the precepts will not be able to answer the question, “What should I do?” The prescription that was once as clear as black and white becomes increasingly gray and the precepts fail us. When failure of this type occurs, it forces us to look deeper into the nature of the system. The problem with using any type of training wheels is that after a certain point, they can no longer help us progress. In order to get any further, we must take them off and learn to balance on our own. When the precepts fail to provide us with an answer, we need to find a more fundamental discriminating factor for moral action.
He gives no concrete examples, although he further extends the training wheels analogy, “Just imagine the reactions Lance Armstrong would have gotten if he raced the Tour de France with training wheels!” And perhaps this sentence frames just how inappropriate the training wheels analogy is. After all, Lord Buddha himself continually followed the five precepts all the way through to his final passing.
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Posted in Philosophy | Tagged five precepts, morality, panca sila | 4 Comments »
June 13, 2009 by arunlikhati
Thanks to Barbara’s Buddhism Blog, I was pointed to a very touching piece by Jeff Wilson, Birth Is Suffering. He paints a new picture of Lord Buddha’s birth story for me:
The Buddha is said to have been born from his mother’s side, which hints at an emergency Caesarian section, and a week later she was on the funeral pyre. Supposedly, the Buddha never knew about death until it became time for him to enter the religious life, but this is blatantly incorrect. He grew up with the knowledge that his birth had been the occasion of his mother’s demise. How could he not have become introspective? In later years, when he said that killing one’s mother was one of the five cardinal sins, he could only have spoken with the knowledge of his own unwilling guilt. It is in the light of his hidden history that we should evaluate the Buddha’s puzzling statement that birth is suffering.
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Posted in History, Journal | Tagged birth, Caeserian section, Siddhartha | 2 Comments »