bodhi tree swaying

This, sadly, isn’t that different from some of the stuff you’ll find attributed to the Buddha on many quotations sites.

HT to @nivarasa for this.

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 often 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 …

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.

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 …

These are all photographs of my grandfather, Robert Drummond Stephen (born My 10, 1900), who was a professional soldier in the The King’s Own Scottish Borderers. He was my dad’s father.

Unfortunately I never met him because he died in an accident on Aug 3, 1942, long before I was born.

The first two pictures were taken in Egypt in 1924 and 1925. I get the feeling that the young lady was not a strict adherent to Muslim morality.

There were many …

This footage is quite extraordinary and painful. The cruelty is sickening, but then you have a USDA inspector saying he doesn’t want to be told about abuses to animals because then he’d have to shut the slaughterhouse down.

The launch of the second edition of “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View” is this Friday, November 13. By the way, you’re invited to my online launch party.

The launch of the second edition of “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View” is on Friday, November 13 (by the way, you’re invited to my online launch party).

From the Guardian, a couple of days ago.

Eating meat could become as socially unacceptable as drink-driving because of the impact it has on global warming, according to a senior authority on climate change.

Lord Stern of Brentford, former adviser to the government on the economics of climate change, said people will have to consider turning vegetarian to help reduce global carbon emissions.

“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better,” Stern said.

Farmed ruminant animals, including cattle and sheep, are thought to be responsible for up to a quarter of “man-made” methane emissions worldwide.

Stern, whose 2006 Stern Review

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The meal I cooked last night was so good I was moved to swear (mildly) out loud, which is most unfortunate since both kids started cursing. My two-year-old daughter liked it so much she also hugged and kissed me. So here it is — Bhara Hara Kaddoo — or baked courgettes (zucchini) stuffed with vegetarian ground meat and bulgur. The recipe is one I adapted, to make it vegan, from a book by Julie Sahni, Classic Indian Vegetarian Cooking.

(For four persons)

INGREDIENTS
4 six-inch courgettes/zucchini
1 tablespoon sunflower or safflower oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
4 oz bulgur (uncooked)
8 oz vegetarian ground beef
2 teaspoons madras curry powder (mild to hot depending on taste)

(For the sauce)
3 tablespoons sunflower or safflower oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1lb fresh ripe tomatoes (puréed)
salt to taste
2 tablespoons chopped fresh coriander (that’s cilantro if you’re American.

METHOD
1. Preheat over to 350F/180C
2. Cut the courgettes in half lengthwise. Use a

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French pop music rightly has a reputation for being awful, but here’s some music in French that’s pretty good. Most of the artists aren’t French. Axelle Red is Belgian. Carli Bruni is Italian. Isabelle Boulay and Julie Dorion are Canadian. Bat For Lashes is a British band with a Pakistani singer. That leaves KYO, who are that rare thing — a French band that doesn’t totaly suck, Florent Pagny, who is one of those French singers who can’t decide whether he’s singing pop music or opera, and Francis Cabrel who is (in my humble opinion) absolutely brilliant.

Enjoy!

If you can see this message it probably means that I’ve successfully switched my hosting from Modwest (which I’ve been with for many years, but which has had many outages recently) to Fatcow, which comes highly recommended. It’s possible there will be some teething troubles, so please bear with me!

After yet another outage at my web host today I looked around for other hosting and found a much cheaper solution that gets great reviews for stability. Unfortunately it takes a while to make the requisite changes, and there may be a period when this site’s unavailable. I’ll try to keep the disruption to a minimum — not that it’s likely to ruin many lives if I don’t.

In other news, I’m making good progress with the Consciousness Element chapter of my book on the Six Elements.

It’s been way too long since I posted a song list using 8tracks, but then I discovered that I can just drag an iTunes playlist to the 8tracks uploader icon and they’ll be uploaded automatically. And iTunes’ Genius playlists automate the selection of the music. This one was based on a Lucinda Williams track called “Knowing.”

There’s an interesting little snippet in the Boston Globe today:

Perhaps heartfelt decisions are smarter than we think. A team of psychologists in Germany [Werner, N. et al., ”Enhanced Cardiac Perception Is Associated with Benefits in Decision-Making,” Psychophysiology] asked people to count their own heartbeats (without taking a pulse) and then asked them to play a computer gambling game, which required choosing repeatedly among four card decks that yielded different returns. People who were more accurate at counting their own heartbeats picked more cards from the decks with better returns. It seems that people who are in touch with feedback from their own body have an easier time learning from positive and negative experiences.

I was talking about something similar in a podcast interview with Tami Simon of Sounds True (I’ll let you know when the podcast goes online). She asked me about writing as a spiritual practice and I explained …

A while back I received a request to answer some questions for a book on “surrender.” Here’s the first draft of my response:

> 1. How would you define surrender? Who or what is one surrendering to, in
> your opinion? God, Universe, Self, Soul, What Is, present moment…?

Surrender is an important part of all spiritual practice. Ultimately it’s what we’re aiming to accomplish in practice.

What we’re surrendering to is the reality of impermanence and non-separateness. In reality, everything changes and nothing (including ourselves) is separate or self-contained. But we have deep-rooted assumptions that we exist separately from the rest of the world, that there is something in us (and others) that is permanent and static, and that happiness can be found outside of ourselves. We believe that happiness is to be found in external conditions, rather than in changing our relation to the external conditions in which we live — …

Here are just a few bullet point updates on what has had my attention over the last few days:

• Most important has been a spiritual breakthrough that I want to write about in a more expanded form. I just don’t have time to do it justice right now. The short version, though, is that I realized that I don’t have a self. This has been very liberating. More later.
• I’ve been working on research for my book on the Six Elements. Currently I’m on the Space element, and I’m doing some background reading on various theories of what space is. Loop Quantum Gravity is the most interesting theory. It suggests that space is quantized — that is, there are smallest units of space, just as there are smallest units of water. And just as there is no water between the molecules in water, there

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My friend Greg asked me to officiate at his wedding a few weeks ago — just the second one I’ve done. It was a small, informal, and very enjoyable affair. Greg just told me today that there’s a YouTube slideshow of the event. I’m in just a few pics, and one time it’s just the hairy backs of my hands as I sign on the dotted line to make it all official.

Enjoy the show:

I am probably the last person on the planet to discover this Italian opera marionette version of the Wrath of Khan, but in case there is another benighted soul surfing the web who hasn’t seen it (and in the unlikely event of that person stumbling upon my blog) watch this video! It’s fantastic.

Gosh, but I’m tired. It seems that I never quite get enough sleep these days, and there’s always one child or another who is going to wake me up long before I’m ready. I found breakfast this morning rather trying. I really just wanted some peace and quiet. Still, there are some days when I’m more rested and robust.

Seems my wife had never heard the exclamation "struth" until I let rip with it today.

One lovely thing today was having my friend Steve Wade round for dinner. I made pizza, and in-between lots of interruptions from the kids we did some catching up. It was great to talk to another adult besides Shrijnana. Doesn’t happen often enough these days.

Seems the theme on my blog is broken. Don’t know why, and I’m not sure  can fix it tonight.

And now for a quick round-up of my activities and interests:

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My Ethiopian friend Asrat pointed out this coffee shop in Addis Ababa, just off Bole Road. The logo bears a certain resemblance to Starbucks, no? I was told that Starbucks threatened legal action but didn’t find that the Ethiopian legal system was as protective of their interests as the US courts are.

• I have to confess I sometimes feel a bit despondent about where we’re going as a society, but then I see a video like this and I feel very hopeful. These kids just seem to love the physical act of singing, and of hearing themselves singing.

• A Fake Buddha Quote courtesy of Jnanagarbha, who received it in his twitter feed:

• "An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea. Buddha."

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