I’ve (mostly) been taking a break from work this week, hanging round the house and relaxing while my wife’s away on a school field-trip. I say “mostly” because a few work things managed to get past my mental firewall. Email’s deadly that way.

One thing I did that was almost work-like but was actually more like play, was to put together a website for a group of Buddhists I’ve visited a few times up in Portland, Maine. They have a small center called Nagaloka, and the group’s main leader, Kathleen, had tried constructing a site using Yahoo’s site builder. Kathleen had never done anything like this before and although she put a lot of effort into the design Yahoo’s sitebuilder leaves much to be desired and had created some very messy code, so I volunteered to see if I could come up with something a little slicker.

I’m pleased with the result. In fact I think I like it more than any other site I’ve designed (I’m not a designer, by the way — I just dabble). It’s best viewed in Firefox. Internet Explorer can’t handle the transparent effect that you’ll see in the main text area on each page. Firefox is in many, many ways a superior browser to IE, and if you haven’t tried it out I’d suggest you give it a go. It’s free!

From MSNBC:

In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

Shame, really. I’d have been very happy to see this study showing some positive results for the power of prayer. This is not because I believe in God — far from it, I’m quite sure there is no creator out there interceding in human affairs. Rather, I have often suspected that holding positive emotions towards another person can, in some mysterious way, have a positive effect on that person. The scientific name for this is Direct Mental Interactions with Living Systems (DMILS) and the phenomenon, while not well understood, has some experimental evidence to support its existence.

The connection with Buddhism here is that in the meditation practice known as Metta Bhavana, or The Development of Lovingkindness, one cultivates positive emotions towards others. While this practice is done primarily in order to change one’s own attitudes, it’s commonly believed that there is also a Direct Mental Interaction with the other person.

I can’t help wondering if the method used in the prayer study was an issue. According to the article, volunteers

Prayed for “a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications” for specific patients, for whom they were given the first name and first initial of the last name.

It’s quite possible that those doing the praying were not actually directing their attention to the patient, but at God. What was being tested here was intercessionary prayer, or prayer aimed at persuading God to intervene in the patients’ recovery. Since I do not believe in the existence of such a being, I would be more interested to see what, if anything, happens when those doing the praying cultivate positive emotion directly towards the patient, especially where the meditators have a degree of experience in contemplative practice. In other words, I’m interested in knowing, does performing the metta bhavana practice have any clinical effect on others?

It wouldn’t bother me if it turned out that it had no such effect; my confidence in the metta bhavana’s capacity to significantly alter my own emotional states is unshakeable. But I would be curious to see the Buddhist equivalent of prayer investigated.

I’ve written several times here about my concerns about religious freedom in the US, and specifically the separation of church and state. Afghanistan, “liberated” in 2002 by the U.S. encapsulates all my fears concerning what can happen when a country becomes a theocracy. Abdul Rahman faces the death penalty if convicted of the heinous crime of having converted from Islam to Christianity.

It’s standard in Islamic countries to have severe penalties for apostasy, or the abandonment of a religious belief, and conversion is strongly discouraged. this is true not just in the Middle Eastern states. In Malaysia, which has a high population of Buddhists, but where the govenment is dominated by Muslims and the state is officially Islamic, it is illegal convert a Muslim to Buddhism, but of course the reverse is not the case. Buddhists in Malaysia have to be careful to mark all flyers advertising Buddhist meetings as “not for Muslims” in case they are thought to be illegally proselytizing.

Although Islam may seem extreme in this regard, we should remember that it’s not so long since Christian theocracies meted out punishments, torture, and even death, not just for those who abandoned Christianity, but even for those who professed a different form of Christian faith. The theistic world view, with its polarization into an absolute source of Good versus a diabolical source of evil, seems particularly prone to despotism: “If you’re not for us, you’re evil, and deserve to be destroyed.”

Buddhism, by contrast, offers a gentler perspective. The Buddha, in the Kalama Sutta, stressed that we have to rely on our own experience to know what is right or wrong, rather that replying on external sources of authority. In the Parable of the Saw, the Buddha taught that the only truly ethical response to words that are untrue, unkind, unhelpful, slanderous, or untimely, is to regard the person uttering these words with lovingkindness (metta). When we do this there’s no possibility of desiring to harm another person simply because they disagree with our religious views, or because they have decided to change the religious path that they are on.

Of course some people will say that I am myself being intolerant in criticizing Islam and Christianity, but I believe that this is a misunderstanding of what tolerance really is. Tolerance does not mean agreeing with everything everyone says, or saying “well, that’s not true for me, but i tmay be true for you.” Tolerance is simply maintaining love, compassion, and respect for another person even though you may disagree strongly.

In February 2001, the Taliban government in Afghanistan demolished the historic (but “un-Islamic”) 1800-year-old Buddha statues at Bamiyan. Now the Afghan judiciary plans to kill a human being who follows an “un-Islamic” religion. As Amnesty International USA Executive Director Dr. William F. Schulz said:

“No individual should ever be persecuted–let alone executed–for his or her religious beliefs. The freedom to practice one’s own faith without fear of retribution is one of humanity’s most sacred rights. If Rahman has been imprisoned solely because he converted to Christianity, he must be immediately and unconditionally released.

Sadhu to that!

A friend recently sent me the following list of resources on lovingkindness (metta), written by various people who are members of the Western Buddhist Order. I haven’t had time to work out where to put these on wildmind.org, so I thought I’d post them here in the meantime.

Unlimited Friendliness by Dharmachari Ratnaprabha
(another translation of the Pali Karaniya Metta Sutta)

Brahmaviharas by Kamalashila

Meditation on Friendliness by Kamalashila

Metta by Tejananda

Upekkha by Tejananda

The Basic Buddhist Virtue: Talk on generosity or dana by Ratnaghosa

The Helpful Enemy: Talk on Patience or Kshanti by Ratnaghosa
a huge article on forgiveness:

Some of these links are to subscription sites that you’d have to apply to join.

Over at Wildmind we’re in the middle of conducting a survey of those subscribed to our newsletter, asking for opinions on online courses. So far there have been over 650 responses, which is about 10% of our mailing list — a very healthy percentage, I reckon — and the results have been very interesting. We’ll be making a lot of changes to the way we tell people about our courses in future, and we have some valuable information about the optimum length of courses and preferred themes for new classes we’re considering offering.

One of the immeditate changes we’ve made is to stop having fixed charges for our online meditation classes and to start offering them on a donation basis. In the survey 20% of respondents thought that meditation courses should be available on a donation basis and 25% thought the same of courses in Buddhism. Actually our charges have never been fixed and we’ve always let people take the course even if they couldn’t afford to give anything, but it seems like a healthy experiment to move to donations.

Curiously, I have a sense of relief to move to a system of mutual giving. When I ran Dhanakosa Retreat Centre in the Highlands of Scotland, we operated this way and were very successful. Probably 85% of people simple pay the suggested donation, with a few people giving less or more. It feels right not to be charging fixed rates.

“Participants [in a study of emotional wellbeing] toting cellphones
and pagers reported increased psychological distress and reduced
family satisfaction.” Discover magazine, April 2006.

But I think it’s computers that are worst, or at least having a
laptop that serves both as my work and home computer. There’s no
separation of emails, and of course it’s so tempting to keep plugging away
on work projects at home. I’m in the middle of setting up a new
Buddhist website at the moment, and it’s so tempting to stay up late,
tweaking it to perfection!

My wife and I decided some time ago to adopt a baby girl from China. Shrijnana has long felt that she preferred to provide a home for a child who needed one than to bring another child into the world, and once we started talking about having a child I started to see things the same way. I was particularly persuaded about this after seeing a National Geographic DVD called The Lost Girls of China. The program is about China’s one child policy and how this has led to the widespread abandonment of baby girls, thousands of whom grow up in orphanages. Seeing the older girls in the orphanages was very moving and I realized very strongly that every child needs and deserves a home. So that’s what we’re going to do.

We’re adopting through an agency called Wide Horizons for Children. This week represented a big step forward: the Citizenship and Immigration Service of the US government gave us official notice that we have permission to adopt a foreign orphan. Although technically China’s lost girls have parents somewhere, they are officially declared orphans once a search for the birth family proves fruitless.

At the moment we’re having our paperwork chached out by WHFR, and the next step will be to submit our dossier to the Chinese government for approval. It then takes about nine months (at present reckoning) for the Chinese government to send us a referral, and two months after that we’ll travel to China to pick up our daughter. This means that all going well we’ll be traveling to China in almost exactly a year, to meet a baby girl who will be between nine and twelve months of age. And this in turn means that our daughter has quite probably not been born yet: an odd thought. When we started the adoption process she won’t evenhave been conceived!

Thoughts have been occurring to me about a retreat I’m leading at Aryaloka later this month. The three words that will be guiding the teaching on the retreat, which I’m co-leading with my colleague, Sunada, are:

• Openness
• Emptiness
• Awareness

The first emphasis on the retreat, Openness, is encouragement to practice broad mindfulness of one’s experience. There are various equally valid approaches to meditation, each of which has its place. The first kind of meditation I learned involved developing a strong and narrow focus of concentration on the breath. Later I learned, mostly through the evolution of my own practice, that it was also possible to use the breath as a central reference point while becoming aware of the full breadth of my experience. It’s like when you’re looking at a picture you’ve just hung on the wall — you’re not just seeing the picture but you’re seeing it in relation to everything around it.

In normal life we tend to become very narrowly focused on thoughts, or on a task, and often notice little else. In mindfulness meditation we can be aware not only of thoughts, but of the sensations in the body, of feelings, emotions, sounds, space, light, odors, etc. The breath becomes a central and loosely held focus point around which everything else is perceived.

The second phase, Emptiness, involves noticing that all the various sensations we experience in this state of broad mindfulness are impermanent. Sounds, images, thoughts, pain, joy, itches: all of the experiences we have come into being and pass. So we sit, observing our experiences as they arise and as they fade away. And in doing so we notice that these experiences — the pleasurable ones and the painful ones — are empty of inherent existence. In other words they’re not solid things, as we tend to assume, but evanescent processes. They’re empty of “own-being” (svabhava). We also can realize that as well as lacking inherent existence, our experiences are not inherent in us. They’re not a part of us. again we tend to assume unconsciously that our experiences are us. But in meditation we can come to see that this isn’t the case.

One way we’ll be approaching this realization is through the Six Element practice, where we contemplate each of the elements of earth, water, fire, air, space, and consciousness in turn, seeing how “we” are made up entirely of elements that are borrowed from the “outside world” and how in fact we own nothing. We don’t so much let go of the elements in this practice are realize that we were never able to hold onto them in the first place. But we can learn to let go of the illusion of holding on, and of the attempt to cling to delusions.

Lastly, we can work on recognizing what is left. We’ve realized that our experiences are not us, that we are not the elements, so what is us? What’s left at the end of the six element practice is often just a sense of lunimous, radiant awareness. This awareness is the ground of our experiences: not separate from them, but relating to them (to use a traditional metaphor) in the same way that water and ice are related. They’re inseparable — you can’t have ice without water — but they’re not the same. Awareness: it’s ever-present and yet indefinable!

So that’s it: Openness, Emptiness, Awareness.

We’ll probably be reading and reflecting on the following poem rather a lot during the retreat.

FROM DILGO KHYENTSE RINPOCHE

If you conquer the primordial nature by distinguishing mind from awareness,
The view of the absolute will gradually become clear.
Even if inwardly awareness is not yet clear right now,
Simply keep the mind from wandering outside;
This will do, for awareness lies in the very depth of the mind.
They are, it is said, like water and ice:
Water and ice are not entirely the same,
For the latter is solid and can be held.
But molten ice is none other than water,
So, in truth, water and ice are not two things, but one.
Likewise mind is not awareness, being deluded,
But mind’s nature, when realised, is none other than awareness.
Although mind and awareness are different in sense,
They cannot be distinguished by analytic reasoning.
One day, as your confidence in awareness grows,
Mind will appear as witless as a child
And awareness as wise as a venerable old sage.
Awareness will not run after mind, but eclipse it;
In a relaxed, serene state, rest at ease.

These really are just snapshots, taken between August and September, 2005, in Scotland (my immediate family), New Hampshire (Karen and Ryan), and Massachusetts (the rest)

You’ll need to have Flash installed to see these.

I’m having some problems with the flash viewer, but you can see the images here (opens in new window or tab.

These were taken in Northern New Hampshire, where we celebrated my wife’s birthday by hiking. You may notice that I developed a certain fascination with fungi on this trip up Mount Garfield (4500 feet, 1372m). Partly I took pictures because I thought the fungi were beautiful, and partly because I had a hankering to look them up in a book when I got home, although I haven’t got round to that yet.

You’ll need to have Flash installed to see these.

I’m having some problems with the flash viewer, but you can see the images here (opens in new window or tab.

These were taken off the coast of New Hampshire. We saw a couple of Humpback whales and a lone Fin whale. You’ll need to have Flash installed to see these.

I’m having some problems with the flash viewer, but you can see the images here (opens in new window or tab.

Photographs of a men’s retreat at Aryaloka Retreat Center, on which we focused on the Tantric Guru who converted Tibet to Buddhism, Padmasambhava, also known as Guru Rinpoche.

You’ll need to have Flash installed to see these.

I’m having a bit of trouble with the software that controls the image viewer. Until I get this fixed you should be able to view the images here (opens in new tab or new window).

From the Boston Globe…

Don’t believe the bit about the cropped gray hair! I’ve been growing my hair and there are only bits of gray here and there.

NEWMARKET, N.H.
Hurry up — and meditate
New CD caters to harried set

By Tim Wacker, Globe Correspondent | March 9, 2006

NEWMARKET, N.H. — In this frenetic world of cellphones, computers, websites, and power lunches, a Newmarket Buddhist wants to help people hurry up and relax.

Through a CD called ”Guided Meditations for Busy People,” Buddhist teacher Bodhipaksa introduces the practice of ”power meditation.” No candles, mantras, yoga, or incense needed.

”All you need is a little time, your breath and a comfortable place to sit,” said Steven Wade, a quality control analyst for a Portsmouth pharmaceutical company who bought the CD a month ago. ”I suspect it would be great to do at my desk at work when I can find a break.”

That’s just the sort of setting the meditations are designed for, Bodhipaksa said during a recent conversation at his Main Street headquarters.

Since 1993, he’s been teaching meditation techniques that take 40 minutes or more and don’t fit in as well in this increasingly fast-paced age.

”A lot of people these days know that they are stressed out, but they don’t have the time to meditate,” Bodhipaksa said.

”But even if you only have four or five minutes, you can still change your state of mind substantially.”

In one meditation, entitled ”Three Minute Breathing Space,” it seems listeners are no sooner told to ”bring themselves into the present moment” than they are instructed to ”return to any activity that you’ve been involved in.”

Bodhipaksa admitted that the 180-second exercise does not allow much time to raise your consciousness, but said it’s a step in the right direction.

”These are more of a way to get your foot in the door,” he said. ”You can get the flavor of it in just a few minutes.”

Each of the CD’s meditations teaches techniques to take your mind off the tasks at hand and focus instead on your breathing, thoughts, body, or the even the day’s events. Whether in your living room at home or a cubicle at work, using headphones or surround sound, Bodhipaksa said, the process requires only that you put in the CD, get comfortable and listen.

”Take a few moments to get in touch with the movement of your breath,” Bodhipaksa says in the first meditation on the CD. ”Letting the body relax just as deeply as you can . . . until you feel ready to bring your awareness back to the world around you.”

Eight minutes and 17 seconds later and you’re ready to read your e-mails.

With a Scottish accent, full head of closely cropped gray hair and blue jeans, Bodhipaksa seems worlds away from temples and saffron robes. And Newmarket is a long way from New Delhi.

Despite appearances, this former mill town has been home to the country’s largest sect of the Western Buddhist Order for the past 20 years.

Bodhipaksa decided it was a good place to move his nonprofit store, Wildmind, where he sells cushions, kneeling stools, books and CDs.

The business looks more like a stationery store than solace shop, and Bodhipaksa can be found painting the shelves when he’s not putting together meditation CDs. However, his voice glides with a Scottish lilt that instantly puts the listener at ease.

”He’s very good, his voice is very soothing,” said Wade. ”If I’m running late and can’t dillydally, I’ll use the new CD.”

Bodhipaksa’s previous CD, ”Guided Meditations for Calmness, Awareness, and Love,” is a best-seller on Amazon.com. His website gets hundreds of hits a day from people downloading his free instructions on meditation.

The early sales of his latest effort, ”Guided Meditations for Busy People,” are hard to estimate this soon after its release, but Bodhipaksa expects it will do well.

In this busy world, he says, there are a lot of people who would love to learn to meditate if they could only find the time.

”These meditations are more like stepping out of a trance, not into one,” he said.

”People’s minds these days are nonstop, caught up in thoughts that can be bad for them. I teach people to realize different ways to work with their minds.”

This time the outbreak of common-sense is in South Carolina, which joins Ohio in rejecting school standards stipulating that evolution be subjected to “critical analysis.” All science is of course subject to critical analysis — science fundamentally is critical analysis — but what had been planned here by the school board was a religiously-motivated backdoor assault on a body of knowledge that is supported by a vast mass of evidence. “Critical analysis” here means trying to cast doubt on well-supported theory when it conflicts with the scientific and cosmological understanding of bronze-age nomads. As such it might be better called “hypocritical analysis.”

The victory in the case against the school board of Dover, Pennsylvania, in which Judge John E. Jones criticised the “breathtaking inanity” of the (by the time of the trial’s conclusion, former) board members, who had repeatedly lied under oath about their motivations, is surely continuing to have a sobering effect upon fundamentalist board members. The Dover board were of course voted out of office.

As evidence that “critical analysis” is in fact “hypocritical analysis,” I offer the words of Judge Jones:

“It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.”

Intelligent Design claims to be science, but because it is “science” without evidence it is in fact profoundly unscientific. The basic argument of the ID true believers is that we don’t fully understand everything about evolution, so why try? If we can’t yet explain in detail how life arose, and if haven’t yet been able to explain the current complexity of living forms, then let’s just say that God (sorry, an “Intelligent Designer” — after all it could have been little green men) conjured up the whole “irreducibly complex” shebang.

Presumably however this hypothetical designer would be more complex than His creation, so nothing at all is explained. We can’t explain the complexity of living things? Well, let’s just posit an even more complex designer!

If ID principles had been applied throughout history, we’d still be saying that mental illness was caused by demons, that the earth was at the center of the universe, and that lightning is the wrath of the Intelligent Designer.

One of the things I like most about America, especially having been brought up in a country where religion was forced on us in school, is the constitutional separation of church and state. As a Buddhist, one of the things I find most frustrating about living here is the degree to which people do not take the consitution seriously, especially in matters of religion. The framers of the US constitution were wise to realize that religious belief can tend towards tyranny. Many of those who arrived on the shores of the US were fleeing the tyranny of religious persecution. Some (sometimes the same ones who were fleeing persecution themselve) came hoping to establish their own tyrannies. Those fundamentalist Christians who wish to foist their religious beliefs upon others are, although they consider themselves to be patriots, betraying the very principles upon which the US is founded.

I was at a retreat in prison yesterday, at which there were some relatively new guys who haven’t been to the regular weekly meditation and Buddhism group, and a handful of guys I’d never seen before.

One of the questions that came up was how vegetarianism fits into Buddhist practice. There was a lot of passion around the subject one way or another, although the discussion was always harmonious and respectful, and even humorous.

One of the volunteers in attendance said that in his view Buddhist ethics involved trying to live compassionately and avoiding causing harm, something I happen to agree with. That’s why I’m a vegetarian and have been since the fall of 1982.

One of the inmates pointed out that the Buddha and the early monastic Sangha ate pretty much whatever was put in their bowls, and so they probably weren’t vegetarians. That’s a bit of a simplification of course, since the vinaya–or monastic code of conduct–allows monks to refuse certain kinds of food and also since monks can educate householders to live more compassionately by not eating meat. After all, the Buddha encouraged lay Buddhists not to kill, cause to kill, or approve of others killing. If Buddhist monks took that teaching seriously there would be a lot more vegetarian Buddhists around. By buying meat you’re encouraging others to kill and financially giving your approval to that activity. But he’s right that the Buddha was not himself vegetarian.

In addition there were a couple of not-very-logical arguments in favor of eating meat. The most absurd (and absurdly common) is the idea that a vegetable and an animal are both living, and since vegetarians are eating vegetables they too are killing. Someone pointed out that vegetables don’t feel pain, and a couple of people were on the verge of disagreeing with that when I broke in. I said that the technical term for someone who couldn’t tell the difference between a carrot’s suffering and a rabbit’s suffering was a psychopath. That got a few laughs, but I really believe it.

The other absurd argument was that if everyone became vegetarian overnight then thousands of people would be put out of business. Well, if you can find a way to make everyone turn vegetarian overnight then let me know! Generally these social changes take decades and industry and farming adjusts accordingly. Everyone becoming vegetarian overnight? Ain’t gonna happen!

It’s very hard for the guys in prison to practice vegetarianism. Some stick at it while others have tried and can’t keep it up. Yet others haven’t even tried. And I don’t blame them. From what I hear the vegetarian food in there is awful. The guys talked about textured soy meatballs they ate that were literally rotten. One guy, who recently stopped being a vegetarian, said that it was like biting into mildew, and there were some murmurs of agreement. And the variety is poor, with just the same four meals over and over again.

One young guy, a sex offender who’s only about 20, said that he had no intention of being vegetarian when he gets out, despite the fact that he considered himself to be a sincere Buddhist. I confess I had the last word in the discussion when I said that the central issue with regard to vegetarianism and Buddhist practice is the extent to which we’re prepared to see own desires for non-essential pleasures (and eating meat is definitely non-essential) as being more important than the sufferings of otehr beings. And the amount of suffering involved in the farming and slaughtering industries is, as I know from experience having worked on farms and in a slaughterhouse, immense. With all due modesty, I wrote about this in a book on vegetarianism and Buddhism that you can find on Amazon if you just search for my name (Bodhipaksa).