Yearly Archives: 2012

Teachings

An Odd Song To Sing?

Leave a comment

A new post on Field of Merit has the title of Song Of The Skin Bag. The title is a riff on the title of the previous post (Song of the Grass-Roof Hermitage). That post featured a poem by one of our spiritual ancestors Sekito Kisen which has the same title as the post itself. Here is a middle section of the poem which I really resonate with:

Turn around the light to shine within, then just return.
The vast inconceivable source can’t be faced or turned
away from.

This is a song to sing-along with.

Out and About

Buddhist Flags

Leave a comment

Buddhist_bunting_Edmonton.jpg
Bunting fluttering from the guttering – Edmonton Canada

These Buddhist flags were strung along the front of the house where the Edmonton Buddhist Priory had its’ home back in 2004-2006. I took this picture in the winter with, as you can see, snow on the ground. Ah, those cold crisp and bright days. Sometimes the wind would get up and the flags would billow and flutter pleasingly.

Flags are so welcoming. We don’t see this particular style so often out for the public to see and most people don’t know they are Buddhist flags. Everybody on the other hand knows what Tibetan pray flags are like. Of recent times temples have been making their own bespoke flags with symbols such as a wheel or a lotus stenciled on them. Colourful and jolly and most often used at the time of the Buddha’s Birth (Wesak) in early May.

In Edmonton these flags were permanently attached. So much so I remember struggling to get them down when the Priory moved to an apartment in June of 2006. One chap, who became a regular attender at the Priory, told of how he was out walking one day and saw the flags. Knowing them to be Buddhist ones he knocked on the door and was amazed and glad to find a place to meditate which was just around the corner from where he lived.

For those who know their meaning these flags are great advertising. They got at least one person out of the cold and onto a chair to meditate.

This post is in gratitude to the couple of friends in East Asia who have send a parcel of these flags as a gift. I believe they will come in handy some time in the future.

Overcome Difficulties

The High Line NYC

Leave a comment

All eyes are turned towards the East coast of North America as the hurricane rages and rants through. And up there, thirty feet in the air, is an amazing project. The High Line. A creative development on a decommissioned railway track in the heart of the city. A public park! Simply amazing. A bow to resourcefulness and vision.

The High Line was built in the 1930s, as part of a massive public-private infrastructure project called the West Side Improvement. It lifted freight traffic 30 feet in the air, removing dangerous trains from the streets of Manhattan’s largest industrial district. No trains have run on the High Line since 1980. Friends of the High Line, a community-based non-profit group, formed in 1999 when the historic structure was under threat of demolition. Friends of the High Line works in partnership with the City of New York to preserve and maintain the structure as an elevated public park.

This is a merit post. Spare a thought for the hardship and suffering brought about by the extreme weather.

Daily Life, Overcome Difficulties

Prone To Ponder

2 Comments

This book and talk by Susan Cain should please all those closet introverts amongst us who have been trying to fit into the chatty world we inhabit.

Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts’ need for lots of stimulation. And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new ‘groupthink’, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place.
[…]
There’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.

From time to time people ask why we, in our order, do not pull the crowds and why we remain really small in numbers relatively speaking. The thing is contemplatives, people drawn to contemplation, are rarely gregarious types skilled in communication and the like. However there are many fine examples of reflective types speaking out. The Buddha?

This TED talk The Power of Introverts has really helped me to appreciate the spectrum of behaviour the terms introvert/extrovert cover. Each of us has a reflective side as well as the chatty side. But sitting gazing out of windows at leaves falling off trees is little valued. Even by those of us who are prone to ponder in this seemingly pointless way.

Teachings

Grasping Buddhism

Leave a comment

The following was originally a Daily Dharma offering from Tricycle.

eleph5b.jpg
Image source.

In a famous parable, the Buddha imagines a group of blind men who are invited to identify an elephant. One takes the tail and says it’s a rope; another clasps a leg and says it’s a pillar; another feels the side and says it’s a wall; another holds the trunk, and says it’s a tube. Depending on which part of Buddhism you grasp, you might identify it as a system of ethics, a philosophy, a contemplative psychotherapy, a religion. While containing all of these, it can no more be reduced to any one of them than an elephant can be reduced to its tail.

– Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs; from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith, a Tricycle book.

I’m so glad to find this image of the elephant and the blind men. We often use this parable. To have this image is so good.