bodhi tree swaying

Random grooves

I liked what my iPhone randomly put together last night as I was driving home from teaching a meditation class.

8track plays them in random order, but here are the tracks.

Just Another High – Roxy Music
Just Friends – Amy Winehouse
Kakn – Gigi… See More
Kiss The Sky – Shawn Lee & The Ping Pong Orchestra
Knowing – Lucinda Williams
Lady Stardust – David Bowie
The Lake – Antony And The Johnsons
Land Of… – St. Germain
Last Nite – The Strokes
Last Walk Around Mirror Lake – Boom Bip
Lazy Calm – Cocteau Twins
le ciel dans une chambre – Carla Bruni

I have a dream

Delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely …

On the way to publication

The other day I was sent a draft of the blurb for “Living as a River,” to be published by Sounds True on October 1, 2010.

This will give you an idea of what the book’s about.

I must say that I’m enormously impressed by the degree of skill shown by all the staff at Sounds True, the blurb-writers included. Incidentally, I was told “Joe, our Copy Chief who wrote this copy said to tell you that he (like many of us) has a great feeling about this book!” How very encouraging!

10.01.10

10.01.10 is the date (US-style) of when my book, Living As a River, is published by Sounds True. The date has a rather symmetrical loveliness.

I just got the MS back from my editor today, along with her suggested changes and with some lovely comments.

She said: “I have totally fallen in love with this book.”

She also said: “It has opened my heart and mind up in countless ways.”

These are nice things to hear.

Two quotes

I’ve been reading a little about the Stoics recently. They were a Greek/Roman school of philosophers who started about 300 BCE and who continued teaching until 529 CE, when the Christian emperor Justinian I banned pagan philosophies.

There are a lot of similarities between Stoicism and Buddhism. Here are two quotes that parallel each other very closely.

“…as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person’s own life.”
– Epictetus

“Irrigators guide water; fletchers shape arrows; carpenters bend wood; the wise control themselves.”
– The Buddha

Fake Buddha Quote of the Day

Spotted on Twitter:

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
—Buddha.

It’s no doubt surprising to many people, since the terminology is a standard part of modern discussion about Buddhism, but the Buddha didn’t talk in terms of “the present moment.” The closest I know to the quote above is a single reference in the Majjhima Nikaya (131), which says:

“You shouldn’t chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there.”

There is also however a passage where a disciple of the Buddha, Samiddhi, says the following:

“I, friend, do not reject the present moment to pursue what time will bring. I reject what time will bring to pursue the present moment.”

But of …

Fake Buddha Quote of the Day

Just spotted in the wild:

“You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself”
–Buddha

There’s nothing wrong with this — it just isn’t something the Buddha said.

Whither flows the stream?

At the source, at the very source are live streams.
Through my body trickles air like birch sap.
And the buzz of bees, the midsummer sun
Ripple inside me and ripple above.

At the source—living streams…
I won’t ask where they flow.
Only blend into the floating shadow of a tree,
wrap myself in a bird’s tremulous melody.

At the very source is a glow.
I don’t ask whither flows the stream.
At the deepest source is a glow.
Through me ripple grasses and the sky,
Birch trees and the midsummer sun.
What am I in this eternal flow?

From “Intermezzo,” by Janina Degutytė, translated by Gražina M. Slavėnas

Vortex in the river of life

My publisher asked me to think about images for the cover of my forthcoming book on the six elements — a book about how we can seek happiness in the midst of an impermanent world. This image seems perfect. It has an eddy in it, which is a great illustration about how something can have a form, and yet everything that constitutes the form is forever passing through to somewhere else. Also, the eddy isn’t separate from the river. The mind likes to imagine a demarcation, but it’s impossible to pin down any boundary. That speaks volumes to me about how we see ourselves as separate from the world, and also as unchanging, while actually our nature is the opposites of those things.

And it’s a natural image rather than a studio shot, so it’s perfect for a book about the elements. I wonder …

Fake Buddha Quote of the Day

Someone just brought this to my attention:

“Suffering, if it does not diminish love, will transport you to the furthest shore.” – Buddha

This one appears in a CNN article.

It bears utterly no resemblance to anything the Buddha’s recorded as saying. As is common with Fake Buddha Quotes it’s really a kind of wish-fulfillment regarding what people hope the Buddha might have said. I simply don’t recognize in this “quote” anything resembling what I’ve come across in my fairly extensive reading of the Buddhist scriptures.

I sometimes wonder about the people that make these things up. What are they thinking? That the Buddha’s dead and gone and therefore it’s OK just to invent a statement and to claim that it’s something the Buddha said? The mentality totally eludes me. At my most charitable I can accept some genuine confusion resulting in this kind of mangling, but of course once a …

Marjory Tragham, 1911-1998

Today would have been the 98th birthday of my mother’s mother, Marjory Tragham, née Marjory Robertson Duncan. This picture is of her with my Grandad, Thomas Tragham (born Tragheim).

Fake Buddha Quote of the Day

I’m not really going to post one of these every day. My title is as fake as the following quote.

“When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.”

I came across this on Twitter today, tweeted by Buddha_Bones: “RT @Sharon_Phoenix “When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.” ~Buddha”

This can be found in various books attributed to Jack Kornfield, the Buddha, and Shunryu Suzuki. As far as I can tell, those words first crop up in Saddhatissa’s “Before He Was Buddha: The Life of Siddhartha” (page 92) I don’t have the book and Google only offers a snippet view, so I’m not sure whether Saddhatissa puts those words into the Buddha’s mouth, or whether they are words that Saddhatissa says and someone else has mistaken them as the Buddha’s. If you have a copy of this book, please do let me know.

Like many …

What makes you come alive?

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. Then, go out and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Harold Whitman, cited in Ben-shahar (2007)

Malkias’s vocabulary

This is a list of the words that Malkias spontaneously uses in an appropriate context. There are many more words he says but only in repeating them soon after he’s heard us use them:

Words up to November 19, 2009.

1. ball
2. bath
3. beep
4. beh-bee (belly button)
5. bye
6. cheese (when having photographs taken)
7. daddy
8. down
9. eye
10. here
11. hi
12. help me
13. honey (as a term of endearment)
14. hot
15. light
16. me
17. miaow
18. mine
19. muh-muh (milk) – but this and mommy are almost interchangeable
20. mommy
21. roll
22. (a)round

…

My book almost has a title!

I received this email from my publisher today:

I saw the content from the book that you sent to Jaime, and it really looks like it’s coming along. I think it’s going to be a truly brilliant book.

We had a meeting today to discuss the title and subtitle, and to brainstorm a bit around it. The goal was to create a title that really represents what’s in the book, but also conveys the benefit the reader might receive. This is a tough balance to strike! But we hammered something out that Tami and I both think is great. You’ll see we stole from the title of the podcast here, which we both liked a great deal. With some subtitle iterations, and in the order of our preference, our proposals are:

LIVING AS A RIVER: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change
LIVING AS A RIVER:

…

Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View – The Launch Party!

Welcome to the launch of my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View. All today I’ll be online, doing various things connected with the book and its subject. Do feel free to drop in and say “hi” or “congratulations” or anything else you feel inspired to utter (using the comment form, naturally; you can talk to your computer if you want but I probably won’t hear you!).

As well as the welcome video I’ll be adding new material to the blog all day, and I’ll add links on this post. So this is the “home page” for the party, with different “rooms” where you can mingle.

First you have to dodge the author touting his wares in the hall and spouting his opinions:

• Here’s a list of places

…

One final book-launch party offering, via Dirk Johnson

[Part of my book-launch party offerings.]

Dirk Johnson, a friend from Twitter, wrote a poem a while back about Buddhists who justify their meat-eating on the grounds that “it’s ok to eat animals because everything is empty.”

Here’s a link to the poem. Please do go read it in its entirety. It wags a finger, but in a playful way.

And here’s an extract:

Oh, you Buddhist, so far along the path
That you’ve realized
Your own inseparability from emptiness,
That your own pain is without essence,
That your own suffering is an illusion,
That your imputed self is a mirage,
You, who realize this so deeply
That you even experience
This emptiness in the minds of other beings,
The bliss that they think is their pain,
So that you can see them killed and eat them
Without the slightest perturbation of regret.

Tonight’s dinner

[Part of my book-launch party offerings]

Potatoes roasted in olive oil with thyme from the garden.

Tofu, deep-fried, and then stirred into an orange/ginger sauce with garlic and chili.

And of course salad with a home-made balsamic vinaigrette.

Lots of protein, and in fact lots of everything good. The photograph doesn’t do it justice.

Plants are living too. Aren’t vegetarians inconsistent?

This post is one in a series connected with the launch of my book, “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View,” and with my book launch party. It’s a brief extract from my book.

The notion that vegetarians are being inconsistent in eating plants because plants are living things is very common: there can scarcely be a vegetarian who hasn’t heard this argument several times. It is hard, however, to see how plants can suffer. They have nothing corresponding to a central nervous system or even to nerves. While it’s of considerable evolutionary benefit for animals to have a sense of pain so that they can escape danger, why should plants, which are by nature static, have evolved such a sense? I believe that we instinctively recognize that plants are of a different order from animals. I doubt if many who employ the above argument would really feel the same seeing a carrot

…

Why Roger’s a vegetarian

This Just came in from my old friend Roger as a contribution to the the launch of my book, “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View,” and with my book launch party. I swear he hasn’t aged in ten years.