Dharma Wheel

sattva wrote:Yes (I also like sounds up to a point)

It has been a long time since we have chatted. Are you well and happy?

Yes, thank you. Things are working out.

Are you well and happy?

sattva wrote:

Kunga Lhadzom wrote:Do you prefer sound or silence ?

I can't answer this as a yes or no question!

True.

Do you like silence?

Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit ('cos it's Easter)

rachmiel wrote:You can see how enlightened you are by your score.

Others can too. We will then finally know who to idolize and who to scorn.

rachmiel wrote:How about measuring your progress by how content you are? How happy. How equanimous. How whole feeling.

How reasonable, moderate, peaceful and generous in spirit too.

pothigai wrote:The union jack is seen by a lot of people as a symbol of British colonialism, I think that is in part why some people do not like a flag with such a symbol on it.

That is why I think it is better to change the whole flag, rather than just the bit many would rather forget.

The Ponga is not the symbol for the All-Blacks, it is an integral part of Maori art and symbolism (as the koru), that has been adopted as the symbol for the All-Blacks (and others). New Zealand's Maori heritage stretches back a little (a lot) further than it's British heritage and including the sym...

This is a great topic. It seems to me that critics of the old and current NZ standard have some legitimate criticisms to make. It really is difficult to distinguish the NZ flag from Australia's, even for many Kiwis. If I were to vote in this referendum, however, I would have voted against the propo...

New Zealand has voted to retain its existing flag, so the proposed new flag is now history. John Key and his government spent $26 million trying to persuade us to rebrand ourselves under a new corporate logo:

DGA wrote:There is a longstanding and rich history of debate in Zen. For one example, see: Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-Century China, by Jiang Wu, Oxford University Press, 2011.

I stand corrected, and a little more knowledgeable for it.

I don't know much about Bodhidharma. I know very little about him myself. I know that he is a patriarch of Zen and that legend states he cut off his eyelids during a long period of meditation in order to remain awake. I like this classic image: http://www.onelittleangel.com/common/images/auteur/Bod...

Bodhidharma still has his eyelids. Hard to tell. I don't remember him having a mangled hand though.

Tibetan men are lucky to have sparse facial hair. Is that a grey hair on his head? He doesn't look that old.

It would be helpful to have some kind of indication as to what we are being asked to comment on.

The first image reminds me of an Egon Schiele self-portrait. Especially with the yellow halo.

The second image has me wondering where it was taken. He looks to be Tibetan, but not necessarily in Tibet.

I'm intrigued. Tell me more about this vapid intellectualization, where it lives, and how it is related to this discussion. In an earlier post, you claimed that it's not sensible to expect Zen teachings to lack contradiction or to be internally consistent. Here you seem to claim that Zen teachings ...

Virgo wrote:However, it apparently does negate the need to remove ignorance (see above).

I doubt we can 'remove' ignorance any more than we can chase clouds from the sky. Under certain conditions the sky will clear.

I feel that too many of us are exhausting ourselves blowing at clouds.

I understand that the precepts point to the fact that mindfulness is challenging enough when sober, and that consuming any amount of alcohol will deaden our faculties to some degree. This, of course, is especially important for monks and other full-time practitioners.

Virgo wrote:Let me guess, sentient beings have never been ingnorant? In a conventional sense there is no birth in samsara? Suffering is not real, slavery is not real, abuses are not real, people are not real, harming others is not real?

How real do they need to be?

They are real enough to act on them.

Virgo wrote:This gets defended for 8 posts in a row?

I will repeat it:

"There is no need to clear away ignorance to find Enligtenment..."

So now, there is no need to remove ignorance.

Keep scratching away those layers, it gets better (so I understand).

DGA wrote:We are not discussing an intellectually lazy, loopy, or airheaded tradition here*.

Of course not, quite the contrary. Zen is rigorous in its avoidance of vapid intellectualization.

Jundo in the following paragraph the second sentence betrays the first and the last betrays the first and second. A visit to a Vajrayāna subforum may better provide the logical consistency you seek. To demand that from Zen teachings is to entirely miss the essence of Zen and the way it approaches t...