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ToxicSlurpee posted:Hello, I'm a person with some heavy duty mental illness issues that is also a Buddhist. I can probably shed some light on this one. For me there's a lot of "this feeling is my brain being stupid." It also helps to know why my brain is being stupid. I've been reading heavily about mental illness, seeing a therapist off and on, and just in general learning to sort my thoughts from things that are a valid reaction to something from my brain being a dummy. A lot of mental illness comes from actual, physical mechanical and/or chemical things going on in the brain. Other parts of it come down to maladaptive learning. I had a horrible childhood which led to learning a lot of destructive defense mechanisms. This comes down to the right view stuff; it's extremely important to see things as they are. I have issues; why do I have issues? Where do they come from and how do they affect my behavior? There are a lot of things, at least in my case, that come down to stupid lizard brain stuff. Your lizard brain is great at surviving but is loving stupid at basically everything else. This is why there is also that focus on right action. You can't help but feel anger but what you can do is refuse to act on it. My condition led to an unpredictable temper that could end up on a hairline trigger. Buddhism was a massive help in getting that under control because instead of acting impulsively on raw emotion I learned to step back and say "is that the right thing to do here? You're angry but why are you angry? Is acting out of anger truly the best option here?" The mind is a very complex thing that can't be entirely divorced from the hardware that it lives in. Understanding the hardware helped understanding such things massively. Same with how the conditions develop and what the end results are. Thank you for your perspective! Perhaps I lacked nuance when I enquired about Zen and meditation. From what I have observed, many Zen centers focus mainly on sitting, with other activities (like the ones you mentioned) being secondary to the primary practice. It seemed that would make participation for those suffering from certain mental illnesses very difficult.
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Jul 14, 2019 21:12
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Thirteen Orphans posted:Thank you for your perspective! Perhaps I lacked nuance when I enquired about Zen and meditation. From what I have observed, many Zen centers focus mainly on sitting, with other activities (like the ones you mentioned) being secondary to the primary practice. It seemed that would make participation for those suffering from certain mental illnesses very difficult. Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No. Granted I don't think walking the path is ever easy.
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Jul 14, 2019 21:46
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More discussion on Mental Illness and Buddhism: I have Generalized Anxiety and Depression, with a touch of OCD. When people talk about the 'black dog' following you around, it's accurate - though in my case, it's a black yippy Terrier. I couldn't meditate when the black dog was untrained and running feral. I couldn't concentrate on Dharma teachings, Buddhist concepts, or anything that was above and beyond basic survival. I would try, and it's like absolutely nothing was getting in, because my head was filled with intrusive thoughts instead. You really can't do anything when your brain feels like it's filled with bees and TV static all the time - there's no room for anything else. The one thing that finally taught the black dog to sit and stay? Citalopram + therapy. My brain feels like it can take in input again. The intrusive thoughts are 95% gone, and when they do rise up? I'm able to stop, take a pause, and analyze what the stressor is that's causing the thoughts to rise up - and that settles down the other 5%. Only then could I concentrate on Dharma teachings, and really take an introspective look at what this Buddhist path is, and whether or not I want to follow it. (My brain doc and my Therapist both know of this, and they think it's a good idea.) Yeah, I wanna follow it. I took Refuge two days ago. They completely messed up the year, and wrote '09' instead of '19'. Though that even seems accurate, as I've been considering and studying Buddhism for the past decade or so. The ceremony was short and sweet - but then, we all in our Refuge class inadvertently sat through the Tsuktor Barwa Initiation that was scheduled to happen right afterwards, as no one told us to leave. "Welcome to Buddhism, here's your Dharma Name, now we're going to throw scented rice into the air and chant in Tibetan for the next hour and a half. Enjoy! Welcome to Sakya!" Qu Appelle fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Jul 19, 2019 |
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Jul 19, 2019 19:20
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I use the waking up and Sam Harris is doing the pointing out instruction from Dzogchen I think. Trying to point out the “intrinsic selflessness of consciousness”, but I really have trouble with it, because it feels no matter what I do that “the self” is there. On psychedelics I’ve experienced what I believe is ego-loss, so maybe I think I know what that feels like, or maybe that’s confusing me, but regardless that feels like a unique experience, rather than some insight into the way things really are. What if the self isn’t an illusion, it’s just something that doesn’t need to exist within experience. It was interesting when Sam Harris had rimpochi (sorry I butchered his name) on a talk and he spoke of many egos we have, and how to embrace and cultivate the selfless ones. But it’s selfless in action and intent, not so much “there is no self”. I suspect it’s just something I am yet to experience 🤷♂️ Also I think music is an interesting meditation object, especially pre-recorded music, because unlike most other things, you do know what’s coming next. I recently had an experience listening to music a lil bit drunk and stoned, and it felt like I knew every single part of the music utterly perfectly. I was familiar with the music but not listened hundreds of times, and it made me think of how consciousness has some internal buffering system to make it never seem like inputs and thoughts aren’t aligned time wise (ie when we touch something the visual aspect doesn’t appear in consciousness before the tactile aspect despite one being slower than the other) and made me think that consciousness, from a time point of view, that “now” probably isn’t this single split section, but somehow that “now” probably exists over a chunk of time, and that what I was experiencing was hearing a bit of music I was familiar with, and it was like the part of my mind that felt like it knew it perfectly was probably a moment or two after actually hearing it and that data coming “around the back” into another part of my mind which was a moment behind, so it was like I was experiencing the past (but just a very short fraction of a moment behind) as now, but because I already had the input it felt like I knew it perfectly, because I had literally just experienced it, so how could I not have known it well? A big ramble but the point about now probably lasting more than a nanosecond is interesting and I suspect the half drunk and high state “extended” that length of time that feels like “now”. I wonder if it can be extended further 🤔
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Aug 27, 2019 19:40
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Has anyone here ever experienced spontaneous taint pleasure while practicing sitting meditation?
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Sep 3, 2019 04:25
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the tibetan meditation I do actually involves breathing through the taint, so I'd have to say yes!
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Sep 4, 2019 09:27
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Tias posted:the tibetan meditation I do actually involves breathing through the taint, so I'd have to say yes! My understanding is that in Theravada Buddhist meditation you're supposed to just note and ignore sensations like these. Is this true of other schools of Buddhism? Are energetic sensations or sensations of pleasure at all useful for the goals of meditation or are they just a distraction?
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Sep 5, 2019 01:36
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why meditate when you can just... rely on amida? thank you, i'll be teaching religion 100 all semester
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Sep 5, 2019 03:15
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Shadow Pussy Wanter posted:My understanding is that in Theravada Buddhist meditation you're supposed to just note and ignore sensations like these. Is this true of other schools of Buddhism? Are energetic sensations or sensations of pleasure at all useful for the goals of meditation or are they just a distraction? I assume he's talking about tummo, and not what would be considered normal meditation. Tummo is a yogic practice, part of the Six Yogas of Naropa, and involves deep breathing and using those breaths to metaphorically "stoke" the fire at the "secret place" which then melts some seed syllables and generates some bodhicitta nectar etc. and if you're doing that you're gonna get sensations but you're probably too busy doing all the other associated yogic practices that you're actually working on since tummo is usually done as part of some other stuff. So in this case it's not a distraction but a byproduct of a yogic exercise, but the yogic exercise I would only begrudgingly called meditation - you are habituating a thought, but it's not mindfulness or calm-abiding, which is what most people are talking about when they say meditation, including and especially the Theravadans. Directly answering the question, those energetic sensations may be, at times, an indicator that something someone is doing is having an effect, but they aren't the goal and you still work through them all the same. Whereas with the "normal" meditation they are a distraction that can cause you to cling to false-awakenings or deceptive illusory progress. echinopsis posted:I use the waking up and Sam Harris is doing the pointing out instruction from Dzogchen I think. Trying to point out the “intrinsic selflessness of consciousness”, but I really have trouble with it, because it feels no matter what I do that “the self” is there. The Pointing Out Instruction TM is something done from a Lama to a student very directly. There are a handful of codified "pointing out instructions" from different lineages and there are some traditional analogies (e.g. "the nature of mind is like the sky") but generally speaking if someone is talking about a pointing out instruction it's when the Lama does (thing) and the student achieves the recognition of the actual nature of mind. The codified things are more accurately called the "introduction to the nature of mind" and they may or may not result in the recognition. With regards to recognition, those instructions are about introducing the student to some ideas and then guiding them to achieve recognition, which is an actual, visceral, really-real experience of the mind's nature, rather than an academic understanding. We can all say "the mind's nature is emptiness" until we're blue in the face, but actually recognizing that emptiness is another thing. The first recognition is often called the "glimpse" in English, and once a student has achieved a "glimpse" the teaching pivots to stabilizing that recognition so that it doesn't come and go. The intrinsic selflessness of consciousness is an interesting phrase and I suspect it has to do with Harris' self-contradictory position as a knight ardent for materialism and scientific positivism. It's not wrong though. So to try to add some clarity: it's not that the self doesn't exist, it's that the self doesn't have inherent existence. Nagarjuna expands on this in the Mulamadhyamakakakirika ("The Fundamental Treatise on the Middle Way"). The self doesn't exist independently of the object. Buddhists don't conceive of consciousness the way Westerners do, it's not the gestalt of all experiences but instead it's divided into different consciousnesses. So looking at, for example, the eye consciousness: an eye-consciousness-event is comprised of the sense object (the thing seen) making contact with the sense organ (the eye) and this contact results in a sense-consciousness-arising (the sensation) which the thought-consciousness then immediately apprehends and shapes into a thought-consciousness-event (the perception). I've included some Western psych terms for similar but not quite the same things in parentheses. But in any case, the consciousness that Harris is discussing is comprised of these events. Our perception of them, that is, the arising-in-consciousness, depends on "self" and "other." But without "other" there is no "self," and without "self," there is no "other." Neither can exist independently of the other. This is, in Buddhist terms, called "interdependent origination" (or "dependent origination" because English is trash). Because both depend on the other to exist, nothing can exist without anything else. Thus nothing has inherent existence. The "self" cannot have any kind of inherent existence because it can only be identified provisionally as part of a greater aggregation of things. That greater aggregation of things includes all sense experiences as well as all consciousness events and all physical and non-physical objects and actions. But all of those things depend on other things. The Buddha has taught that all composited things are impermanent and so they have no enduring nature. All composited things are dependent on other composited things. Because no composited things have inherent existence, we can say all composited things are empty and devoid of inherent nature. Because all composited things are empty and devoid of essence, and because the "self" is a composited thing (comprised of experiences which are dependent on other), the "self" is devoid of essence. The problem comes from a misunderstanding of what one is saying when one says "the self does not exist." When we say "the self does not exist," we believe this to be a negation of, or the opposite of, "the self does exist." In fact, the quality of existence is not something that can be used to describe a "self" at all, because we can only describe a thing as having qualities like "existence" if it has those qualities inherently (rather than contingently on other things), and since no such "self" can exist which has those qualities inherently, we cannot say "the self exists." This "self" cannot be found anywhere except relative to other things. In this way, we can say that on an ultimate level there is no self, but on a relative level there is a thing we can call a self. The mistake is when we think that relatively existent self is "actual" or that it has essence. Misunderstanding this concept of emptiness is extremely dangerous, because it can easily become nihilism. And, as Gampopa said, "believing in the essential existence of things is stupid like cattle, but believing in nihilism is even more stupid." Paramemetic fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Sep 5, 2019 |
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Sep 5, 2019 03:56
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hmmm food for thought... thankyou for that post. I love all of this
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Sep 5, 2019 07:20
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today in class i went over the second chapter of toshimaro ama’s “why are the japanese non-religious,” which meant i got to teach a class about jodo shinshu and then i had to criticize ama for not talking about zen or nichiren when talking about popular buddhism, and attributed it to his being the son of shin buddhist temple heads i’m sorry for criticizing you for not talking about the nichiren heretics, ama-sensei! i had to be impartial with my students! anyway we talk about hinduism next week and they’re gonna be introduced to buddhism after that
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Sep 5, 2019 20:45
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Shadow Pussy Wanter posted:My understanding is that in Theravada Buddhist meditation you're supposed to just note and ignore sensations like these. Is this true of other schools of Buddhism? Are energetic sensations or sensations of pleasure at all useful for the goals of meditation or are they just a distraction? I have to breathe -through- the perineum, so can't really just feel it move through my neck and lungs instead of it. That said, the aim is of course not taint-pleasure.
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Sep 12, 2019 09:59
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I wanted to gratefully acknowledge the sitting talk from a couple months ago. It's really helped to make sitting meditation much more relaxing for my legs, which helps extend the time I can concentrate. echinopsis posted:hmmm food for thought... thankyou for that post. I love all of this I'd also like to offer what I've learned from the Plum Village tradition's interpretation of non-self. It's not a practice meant to eliminate your sense of that private, stream-like experience of consciousness, memories and future thinking that can be called the self. Plum Village teaches that the practice is much more about seeing how that self is interconnected to everything else, your body, your ancestors, what you eat, the sun, your loved ones and non-loved ones, your breaths, etc. And, in fact, all things are this way, such that we can see how some of the distinctions we may have held to be immutable and separated begin to dissolve by practicing this insight. That's already a spiffy realization for most folks, but a Plum Village discourse would never end there, because the first noble truth is that there is suffering. And the bodhisattvas' path out of suffering is to use all their understanding to ease all kinds of suffering within and around them. Suppose someone has only seen a political map their whole life. Then they may expect to encounter some kind of straight, geographic barrier when they walk between certain territories. They may be surprised to see territories separated by only a man-made marker or no marker at all. Being shown non-self is like being shown a geographic map for the first time. It's not meant to obliterate your understanding of political maps. Yes, those boundaries now mean something in the man-made world, and the man-made world is not a separate entity from the non-man made world. But now you've also seen the geographic condition which transcends the merely political condition. I'm also returning from a trip to Indonesia to introduce my wife to my relatives who primarily live in West and Central Java. I had the chance to visit Borobudur temple for the second time in my life, my first time being when I was about two or three. It was impressive and a bit sad to see. For the most part, it is a tourist attraction and curiosity more than a place of mindful, meditative practice. The upper platforms were especially noisy and busy with visitors sitting on, climbing on, and reaching into the perforated stupas against the rules of the conservation agency that's charged with preserving the site. Still, it's an incredible structure with an incredible story, and I think I should like to visit it on Vesak, when Indonesian Buddhists do walking meditation to Borobudur from still-active Mendut monastery. We're still processing the photos from our recent trip, but I have a picture from my visit as a toddler:  (I was the one in the middle, between my older sister and my nanny)
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Sep 13, 2019 13:42
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the textbook i had to use for my class (because the previous teacher bought it before he quit and i was hired) spends more time talking about tulpas than amida buddha i can't complain too much, though, they've already had two readings from a shin buddhist scholar and are getting a third this thursday so it evens out. still, what an obscure vajra practice to focus in on, right? oh and of course zen gets its own section, because america
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Sep 14, 2019 16:02
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Tulpas? Like... from Magic and Mystery in Tibet? Yikes.
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Sep 15, 2019 01:55
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Was it like, engaging in informing its presumed American audience about the religious context that tulpas fit into, as a way of going against that weird pop strain of thought that treats them like spooky imaginary friends that probably definitely appeared in at least one X File at some point? I'm kind of imagining the textbook author having a bee in their bonnet about reddit tulpamancers
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Sep 15, 2019 13:40
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in order to explain the different realms, he talked about a tibetan meditation in which one constructs an ashura over the period of months or years until it becomes as real as "mundane" reality (his word), and then the monk dismantles it to "gain its power." which like... i don't think that's right, but i don't know enough about vajra to dispute it. it was incredibly confusing to put into a discussion of the six realms, tho, and i really hated that that's where he put it lmao
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Sep 15, 2019 16:05
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Senju Kannon posted:in order to explain the different realms, he talked about a tibetan meditation in which one constructs an ashura over the period of months or years until it becomes as real as "mundane" reality (his word), and then the monk dismantles it to "gain its power." It's not right, that's either cribbing off of or based on an account by Alexandria David-Neel in Magic and Mystery in Tibet. David-Neel was an early explorer in Tibet who asked a lot of questions that didn't translate very well. I get annoyed about the tendency for Buddhist academics in the West to try to turn every drat thing into a psychological model that promotes mental wellbeing and that's all enlightenment is blah blah blah. Unfortunately, the opposite also happens and it happened a lot very early on: esoteric stuff was taught using words that didn't really line up and then they get transformed into Internet foolishness. The term is extremely uncommon in tantras. "tul" (Wylie: 'sprul) means "emanation" and the "pa" ending makes it a noun. So a tulpa is just "an emanated thing." The honorific form is "tulku" which we all know as "dudes who have emanated" but nobody gets weird about that because they're people. When you're doing tantric practice you visualize a hollow form of a deity and then invite the wisdom beings into that hollow form. The hollow form is an illusory mental projection, but it's no different than physical things because phenomena are all equally empty of inherent existence and so even things we can physically see are just illusory mental projections too. However, we then invite the wisdom being (the enlightened formless form) of the deity into that vessel so that we can make offerings and get merits and also receive blessings and so on. When we finish the practice, we mentally dissolve that illusory form and the wisdom beings both and they are (usually) absorbed into the various chakras that we've been meditating on. By installing these deities at those chakras we're creating a transformative template for our body, speech, and mind. The wisdom beings dissolving into those chakras and then merging with us non-dually brings the recognition that we are not "other than" the deity, because self and other are false distinctions. All of that comprises the "generation stage" of practice. This then leads us into the "completion stage" of meditation where we meditate on non-dual emptiness and so on. All of the explanations that David-Neel and other early explorers received were consistent with this, but they were being translated in pidgin or otherwise imprecisely without the benefit of an academic tradition to give us precise language. Subtle nuances like "the illusory projected form is no different than physical appearances" were misunderstood because there was no academic basis for understanding that their non-different-ness is based on the fact that both are devoid of inherent existence and intrinsically empty, not based on the idea that the mental projection becomes physically manifest. David-Neel wrote some wild poo poo as a result. She also documented what may have been actual sorcerous practice, so the whole thing gets ambiguous. Anyhow, that's the thing on "tulpas" but it's hard to get to those terms because they don't call those "tulpas" usually, it's just when she kept asking "what is that thing called, the thing you generate" they eventually were like "it's an emanation." And it is, in that the illusory form emanates from our mind and then the wisdom beings emanate from their primordial Buddha natures and then we merge non-dually etc. You "gain its power" because you're achieving the realizations of the yidam by merging non-dually and then meditating on emptiness and so on. Then decades later the an X-Files writer read Magic and Mystery but didn't attribute it and also just made some poo poo up about it and we're off to the goddamn races.
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Sep 15, 2019 16:31
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i love that you hate this textbook as much as i do lmao it's what happens when a biblical studies scholar goes "yeah i can write an intro to religion text" no, bitch, you can't. also your views on the religious nature of the northern ireland situation and israeli/palestinian crisis is incredibly offensive and incredibly racist
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Sep 15, 2019 18:00
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Can you not just literally throw it out and find some PDFs to give out? cuz jfc that sounds as bad as possible. Like you could probably show a documentary on aghoris hanging out in cremation grounds in India and teach them more than that text will.Paramemetic posted:tulpa stuff lol I wrote up a 'maybe you could charitably see the tulpa poo poo as like 10 iterations of the telephone game misinterpretation of Bhakti practice or deity yoga' and then realized that even that is giving that poo poo too much credit and gently caress trying to justify dumbass colonial misinterpretations of local practices. gently caress even trying to connect them to anything real. The theosophic conception of tulpas is so far removed in concrete terms from literally anything in tibetan buddhist practice (that I'm aware of) as to be literally meaningless. It's just layer after layer of misconception with a bunch of European projection added on top. Anyways, sorry about the animosity, I'm not directing that at anyone, particularly not paramemetic, I'm just in a funk cuz of a super sick dog and it's coming out. I bristle at even the appearance of treating some dumb poo poo someone effectively made up out of whole cloth as being worthy of comparing to the actual practiced tradition.
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Sep 15, 2019 20:27
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Paramemetic posted:It's not right, that's either cribbing off of or based on an account by Alexandria David-Neel in Magic and Mystery in Tibet. David-Neel was an early explorer in Tibet who asked a lot of questions that didn't translate very well.
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Sep 15, 2019 22:39
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oh no, i'm definitely supplementing the textbook with other, better texts (and my great and awesome lectures that are in no way me just looking at my notes, going "oh yeah i remember what i was gonna talk about" and then just saying whatever comes to my brain for a half hour before going "okay group discussion time break out into groups chop chop vaminos vaminos"), although for the buddhism section i am using a jodo shinshu text which most of you would probably be like "why" it's because i had a month to write a syllabus and i didn't get my library credentials until, like, after the class started so i had to use what i could find for free off of google and what i had in my personal collection of books, and since i'm jodo shinshu i kinda just had a lot of jodo shinshu stuff lying around anyway i can't throw it out cause the school bought it and now students have presumably bought it so i'm stuck with it until next semester when i might be able to get the school to buy a better book, but i don't know how much time i'll have to research textbooks since i'll also be teaching a new class and will need to write a syllabus for THAT class and it's probably gonna be a situation where i just go "gently caress it" and use the same textbook and find different, perhaps more varied texts for other religions but you know. that's the community college teaching introduction to religion life. i didn't choose the game, the game chose me (literally the opposite of the truth but you know how it be in community college teaching life). the kids should be grateful i'm putting so much effort into 4500 bones but you KNOW they're not, cause they're not actually DOING the readings i so carefully selected for them. so you know. whatev. community college life, i guess
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Sep 15, 2019 22:50
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Caufman posted:Hello, friend-in-the-dharma. Thanks to all of you who responded to my wild and scared post from a few months ago, I read all of your replies and thought about them a lot. A couple of weeks after I wrote that post, I was lying down attempting to sleep at night, trying not to wake up my wife, and was flooded by a powerful to the point of distracting sense of... numinous connection to everything, and a kind of compassionate embrace of everything that persisted for something like an hour (or at least it felt like an hour.) I can kind of bring that feeling, or the memory of it, back if I focus on it now. If one of you has anything to do with that, thanks! Ever since I have felt relatively unafraid of death. I was able to confront my fears around climate change more concretely, and have been able to manage my mental health situation more directly. I am going to try to get back to sitting soon. I think it will help me to ground or at elast understand this feeling more.
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Sep 15, 2019 23:14
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Senju Kannon posted:community college life, i guess I had a lot of little gripes about the way Huston Smith presented Buddhism in The World's Religions mostly because he did a lot of reaching to try to make a case that Vajrayana Buddhism was based on the doctrine of salvation and being saved by Bodhisattvas or some poo poo but at least he's not promoting the Magic and Mystery version of tulpas. The World's Religions came out in like the 50s and was revised in 1991 and so it should be eminently affordable and while I'm not qualified to judge its treatment of other religions it seemed pretty fair except for loving it up by trying to make a lovely case for perennialism where really there's none to make. lmao if Huston Smith is the author in question tho Herstory Begins Now posted:Anyways, sorry about the animosity, I'm not directing that at anyone, particularly not paramemetic, I'm just in a funk cuz of a super sick dog and it's coming out. I bristle at even the appearance of treating some dumb poo poo someone effectively made up out of whole cloth as being worthy of comparing to the actual practiced tradition. We good my dude I didn't get any animosity from you. Sorry to hear about your dog  In her defense, David-Neel was traveling in Lhasa when it was still an isolationist empire, one of the first to do so. She was a late 1800s feminist and anarchist and so there is an element of "wow colonialism" but in her case I think it's more what you had in mind originally; a very long and bad game of telephone across at least 3 languages dealing with rituals that were not necessarily presented in the context of their philosophical bases. She wrote a bunch about the Drukpas, which created the basis for the "Dugpa" evil Buddhists in Twin Peaks and a bunch of other dumb poo poo and gave them a reputation as being badass Buddhist sorcerers...but the Drukpa lineage has completely owned it and they sell copies of Magic and Mystery in the bookshop at Hemis Monastery in Ladakh, so, you know, lmao
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Sep 16, 2019 01:09
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There's a lot of both peace and purpose in coming to accept and recognize everything that is out of your control. Conversely figuring out what things you can do that are impactful helps a lot, too. Glad you're feeling better. That kind of paralyzing panic does no one any good and it's wildly unpleasant, too. Paramemetic posted:I had a lot of little gripes about the way Huston Smith presented Buddhism in The World's Religions mostly because he did a lot of reaching to try to make a case that Vajrayana Buddhism was based on the doctrine of salvation and being saved by Bodhisattvas or some poo poo but at least he's not promoting the Magic and Mystery version of tulpas. Thanks, the old girl is actually doing a lot better, it's just been immensely stressful seeing a dog go from 75lbs down to 45lbs. She demolished three big cans of dog food yesterday though, so that's a huge relief. Yeah it's funny because a lot of Tibetan Buddhism, especially the more tantra oriented side definitely doesn't mind being seen as sort of quasi-out of control magicians. Like that's almost a feature and not a side-effect of practicing in charnel grounds and terrifying places, plus it definitely was useful historically at the time of the introduction and spread of buddhism in tibet as a way of adapting buddhist practice to indigenous tibetan religious practice, both bon and even more rural or ancient folk practice and beliefs. Like without the modern context of tons of translations and wikis and fellow english speakers with years of practice explaining the context and nuance of nirmenkaya, yeah it's not surprising that she got only the broad strokes. Hell plenty of native english speaking practitioners would struggle to define a lot of terms. The colonialism thing btw is less of a specific impact of a particular colonial entity, but rather a very common thing where you'll see the most shoddy, overtly falsified, or often outright ill-intentioned source get treated as on par with the best and most authentic of internal sources whether because of simply better penetration due to being in a familiar linguistic and cultural framework or because of explicit bias towards european sources. It's not a concept that gets applied a bunch to Buddhism typically (it's most prominent in native american/first nations oral tradition), but it's a useful thing to be aware of any time there is exchange from one culture to another. It's weird because it then often gets internalized by everyone involved. IMO to the credit of a lot of American and European people involved in Tibetan Buddhism, the effort to learn the language and the various cultural and social and historic contexts does a lot to generally offset that tendency. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Sep 16, 2019 |
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Sep 16, 2019 03:06
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nah it's some nobody biblical scholar who's teaching undergrads in the midwest named will deming and yet, i'm the nobody scholar teaching undergrads at a community college in the south, so who's the real loser? him, because he has a phd and i only have a mts
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Sep 16, 2019 06:25
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Any suggestions on good texts for Mahayana philosophy? I’m especially looking for books that explain Yogacara and Madhyamaka for people without much exposure to them and put them in context.
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Sep 19, 2019 17:46
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Thirteen Orphans posted:Any suggestions on good texts for Mahayana philosophy? I’m especially looking for books that explain Yogacara and Madhyamaka for people without much exposure to them and put them in context. https://www.amazon.com/Mahayana-Bud...la-451894190056 I felt like this covered the broad range of Mahayana topics well and has plenty of inroads deeper into the literature.
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Sep 19, 2019 17:57
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Yiggy posted:https://www.amazon.com/Mahayana-Bud...la-451894190056 That looks great! Thanks!
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Sep 19, 2019 18:29
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one of my students asked me if i counted as a buddhist theologian, and i had to say, “well... yes and no” the illusion of objectivity.... gone. the mysterious reason why so many of the readings have featured jodo shinshu scholars... solved.
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Sep 19, 2019 20:31
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Senju Kannon posted:one of my students asked me if i counted as a buddhist theologian, and i had to say, “well... yes and no”
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Sep 19, 2019 21:32
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that would be self power so no
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Sep 19, 2019 22:09
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Yiggy posted:https://www.amazon.com/Mahayana-Bud...la-451894190056 I’ve been wanting a broader perspective on Mahayana and this looks perfect. Thank you!!
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Sep 20, 2019 03:51
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If you’re interested in Yogacara, Living Yogacara is pretty good
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Sep 20, 2019 05:06
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This thread has really mellowed out in the 5 years since it was so-titled
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Sep 20, 2019 05:13
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Herstory Begins Now posted:This thread has really mellowed out in the 5 years since it was so-titled time for . . . rebirth (of the thread), perhaps?
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Sep 20, 2019 18:24
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Nude Hoxha Cameo posted:time for . . . rebirth (of the thread), perhaps?
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Sep 20, 2019 19:39
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Hindu protestantism: the buddhism thread
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Sep 21, 2019 00:47
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Buddhist thread: How I learned to stop worrying and annihilate the self
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Sep 21, 2019 16:53
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Senior Scarybagels posted:Buddhist thread: How I learned to stop worrying and annihilate the self 
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Sep 21, 2019 18:08
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