Cheers,
John

I am an ordained Soto Zen, Lay, Atheist, fucked up Buddhist. Lost like most of us.
Hope you continue your musings on Buddhism for many years to come my friend. I look forward to your new postings.

_/|\_ in gassho, with deep bow, from Buddhist purgatory here in Ohio,

Ronin Michael

O

I study w/ Genpo Roshi in the Land of Salt…Utah..I will come back and look around . You have a real point of view..
“either in or out always the same…”

Gassho
Hongaku

Cheers,
John

and as for this:

“John is a failing and stumbling Zen asshole that drinks far too much, engages in pagan rituals, reads the Necronomicon (in the original Arabic), yells at Jehovah’s Witnesses and spends too much time on dharma-drama and on his stupid blog. He is a dipshit and you should tell him so.”

Sounds like you’re a Celtic Buddhist!! Seriously!
We’re in Vermont. If you ever are in the area, stop by- we have a nice stone circle, a Ma Cailleach shrine and whiskey!
We’ll get you drunk and paint you blue.

What was it?

I must have missed it.

This is it! This is it!

haha

This is still it!

We aren’t going anywhere here, are we?

Here’s the thing. The Buddha figured out something rather extraordinary. He recognized the inherent unsatisfactoriness of temporal existence and offered a way to “numb the pain” as we soldier on towards our eventual “nibbana” (best translated as “an extinguishing” such as when a candle flame is blown out rather than a metaphysical state of existance as it is so often misconstrued to mean).

He realized there was no magic mantra/prayer/spell that would make all life’s ugliness go away. Life is suffering, he said. And, as if that wasn’t depressing enough, he continued, it gets worse. You grow old. You get sick. And then you die. The Buddha was obviously a man who didn’t mince words or beat around the bush.

Of course, when he said this he was preaching to the choir, as only the most Panglossian of us fail to recognize that life is indeed a bitch and then you die. No great revelation there. But a lot of folks in his time as in our own have difficulties accepting this undeniably self-evident observation.

Granted, Some people try to hide these cold hard facts behind a veil of warm and fuzzy magical thinking, telling folks: Wait!, there’s still hope! There IS an afterlife! (Or reincarnation, if that floats your ethnocentric canoe.) Yes! We can still party hardy! Just give me 10% of your earnings and don’t covet your neighbor’s ass and I’ll save a place for you at the table. Amen!

If only it were so. But if wishes were horses we’d be standing neck-deep in horseshit. Wait a minute…

Regardless, the Buddha hit the existential nail on its angst-ridden head: Life was no trip to Disneyland. (Which is a good thing because we’d all have killed ourselves by now if it was.) Still, life wasn’t all bad. And the Buddha recognized this fact too. Not only did he recognize it, he offered a way to soften life’s unavoidable aches and pains by simply accepting the truth and learning to live a more moral and fulfilling life by following a simple set code of behavior and respecting the right of all living creatures to live in peace and dignity. That’s it.

Notice, I said nothing about chanting mantras or burning incense or buying buddha statues or taking vows or participating in rituals or dressing in lovely robes or going on pilgrimages to distant lands or shaving your head or calling yourself another name or yada yada yada. And do you know why I didn’t mention that stuff? Because that’s not what the Buddha taught. The Buddha, after all, was not a “Buddhist”. He was simply a man who found a way to awaken from a lifelong dream. A man who found a way to live life as if each day were his last until, finally, one of them was. He was, in a word, simply human. Just like us. And when you forget that, you forget every thing he ever taught.

_/|\_ Gassho