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onemindzen · 4 months

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Essence-Function is how reality operates. It has its base in the Awakening of Faith in Mahayana, or Awakening of Faith in the Great Way, if you prefer. The unhindered interpenetration of all dharmas is reality. There is no seam between Absolute & elative Truths, there is no "and" or "but," and there is barely even a hyphen between Essence and Function. EssenceFunction is more accurate as a reflection of reality.

Think of "Essence" not as a soul or spirit, or a thing at all. It's the basis, it's ground zero, its behind everything, it's in the middle and front of everything. It's the noun. "Function" is how Essence is manifested, just as the Absolute only manifests through the relative and vice versa. There can be no Essence without Function, there can be no Function without Essence. Function is the verb.

If you look at the tangle of holiday lights you may have wrestled with recently, the lights are Essence, the untangling, hanging, and turning them on is Function. They are inseparable; there's no dividing line between them. In the end, the lights just do what lights do--throughout that whole process.

When we look at Buddha Nature as our Essence--the commonality among all of us--what is our correct Function? Is it to hate, slander, vilify, and malign ourselves and each other? Drop a dime in the Salvation Army bucket, donate something, or time, or money to someone less fortunate than you, and without any expectation of congratulations, no Great Cosmic "Attaboy."

Just be generous, compassionate, loving, and imperturbable in the face of difficulties, meeting your duties head on. Function is Peace on earth, good will to all sentient beings, peace on earth and good will to you.

Myeong Jin Eunsahn gave the Dharma talk on December 20, 2023

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#zen #AFM #dharma #dharmatalk #Wonhyo #Fazang #buddhism #Youtube

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starryskysakura · 3 years

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How to be happy forever? The best way would be to reborn at the Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss and we will not be troubled by sufferings. To reach this goal, we may recite the sacred name of Amitabha.

YouTube 龍德上師：常念南無阿彌陀如來，將來往生西方極樂世界 (Guru Lung Du: Constantly recite Namo Amitabha will Reborn to the Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss)

#Guan Yin Shan #Amitabha #Happiness #Happy #Guru Lung Du #Lung Du Yung Jing Rinpoche #Guan Yin Shan Fazang #Fazang #Pure Land #Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss #Namo Amitabha #Forever #Happy Forever #Reborn #Suffering #suffer

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daybreakdown · 3 years

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Today it’s the day! The Lotus Sutra Remove Obstacles and Blessing Ceremony, the practice of receiving and keeping The Eight Precepts for a day.

Let’s participate together, if you can receive and keep good the precepts, you can participate together at 8:30am. If you only want to recite the sutra, you may start watching the live at 9:30 am

#guan yin shan #fazang #guan yin shan fazang #Guru Lung Du #Guru Lung Du Yung Jing Rinpoche #Lung Du Yung Jing Rinpoche #Guan Yin Shan Buddhist Association #The Eight Precepts #The Venerable Guru Lung Du #The Venerable Guru Lung Du Yung Jing Rinpoche #The Lotus Sutra #Remove Obstables #Blessing #Ceremony #Practice #Receive #Keep #Precepts

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krisssknut · 5 years

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法藏讲寺

Fazang Jiang Buddhist Temple

Shanghai, China

#temple #shanghai #china #asia #travel #35mm #film #film photography #seagull df1 #fujifilm #street

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garywonghc · 6 years

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Yes, Buddhism is a Religion

by Scott Mitchell

In the American imagination, Buddhism has long been associated with counterculture drop-outs — Beat generation iconoclasts, Age of Aquarius hippies, woo-woo New Agers. This unfortunate stereotype identifies Western Buddhism with the 1960s-era and later converts who popularised it, and ignores the actual people who brought Buddhism to the West — Asian immigrants. It reinforces the idea that Buddhism is not to be taken seriously. At best, Buddhism is seen as something esoteric and disconnected from the world, and at worst, as something flighty and faddish.

On the other side of the coin, proponents of mindfulness meditation and other Buddhist-inspired practices have positioned themselves as level-headed advocates of practices whose benefits, they claim, are proven by science. It’s not hard to imagine that this secular–scientific turn is in part an attempt not to be tarred by the popular stereotype of Buddhism as cultish and downright weird.

Both perspectives are incomplete. In reality, Buddhism is a religion, complete with all the aspects and depth that implies and the respect a great world religion deserves.

Depending on how you slice it, Buddhists account for up to ten percent of the world’s population (and at least one percent of North Americans). People were practicing Buddhism nearly five hundred years before the birth of Jesus. Before the modern period, Buddhism spread across virtually the entirety of Asia, and in the modern period you can find Buddhism on every continent.

Across all this space and time, Buddhists developed a wealth of approaches, practices, art, and literature in service to the religion’s central claim — that there is suffering and a path toward the alleviation of suffering in nirvana. To reduce all of this history, all of these cultures, all of these perspectives, to a hippy caricature or a single secular-scientific technique is to overlook the fullness of one of humanity’s great religions. To acknowledge Buddhism as a religion is to appreciate its long history and endless cultural manifestations (including our own).

“But isn’t Buddhism really a way of life? A philosophy?” some ask. Yes, of course. Like all religions, it has a philosophy. Like all religions, it becomes a way of life when it is practiced. As scholars such as Jay Garfield and Dennis Hirota have long argued, Buddhist philosophers from Nagarjuna to Dignaga, Zhiyi to Fazang, Dogen to Shinran, have been wrestling with philosophical concepts for centuries, long before the likes of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, or Derrida befuddled American liberal arts majors.

To say that Buddhism is a religion is to take seriously not only its philosophy and its practices (its “way of life”-ness, if you will) but also its art, its literature and mythology, and its rituals.

Ritual is not a bad thing. To paraphrase the late anthropologist Roy Rappaport, ritual (and religion) make humanity possible. The ritual marking of transitional life events is as old as homo sapiens itself, so let’s not discount the various ways that Buddhists, both at home and abroad, have responded to this deep need for ritual with their own ceremonies for marking births, marriages, and deaths. (If you doubt the importance of ritual, ask yourself why you keep celebrating birthdays. Or, better yet, stop celebrating birthdays and watch what happens.)

A purely New Age perspective of Buddhism might take all the mythic aspects of the religion a little too seriously; it might assume that devotional rituals refer to some literal truth or some “unseen” cosmic reality (no doubt related to the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, thus losing half the audience in the room).

Perhaps this association motivates some to make the secular turn: to treat Buddhist practices as just that — practices — in service to non-religious ends, such as stress reduction, anxiety reduction, increased focus at work or home, weight loss, and so on. All of this might be of value, but a purely secular–scientific perspective rejects Buddhist literature and mythology as pure fiction, on the assumption that none of it can be “proven” — that none of it can be literally true and therefore should not be believed.

This perspective, that religious myths must either be believed literally or rejected, overlooks the function of myths — not as a literal telling of events but as narratives, morality plays, and inspirational stories meant to convey not actual facts but how to live.

One doesn’t need to believe in some literal sense that the Buddha taught the dharma to the demon Alavaka in the Alavaka Sutta to be a Buddhist or benefit from the dharma. One doesn’t need to debate the veracity of this story or, like a good academic or philologist, debate its authorship or why it was included in the Pali canon. If you leave all of that aside, you can read the Alavaka Sutta as a story about how to live, how to respond to difficulty, and how to be virtuous, truthful, and giving — whether the story is “true” or not.

The ability of a not-true story to be inspirational should not be controversial. I’m quite certain you (or someone you know) has taken inspiration from the phrase “Do or not, there is no try,” despite the fact that no one in their right mind believes that Dagobah is a real planet in a galaxy far, far away. That is how narratives and myths function. Don’t get hung up on belief.

When we reduce the totality of Buddhism down to one thing — whether New Age stereotype or cure-all for the modern world’s ills — we engage in the practice of reductionism. Reductionism flattens difference and complexity. Reductionism always forces us to focus on one thing while overlooking others.

The world today is complicated, and simplistic solutions will not cure its complexities. There is no magic pill that will erase suffering for all persons in all places. This is why Buddhists talk about boundless dharma doors and the eighty-four thousand paths to awakening. For Buddhism to be a vigorous voice for positive change in our world, it will need to engage the world from multiple places — from philosophy to politics to art to myth to ritual and, yes, from the Age of Aquarius to secular science. Fortunately, Buddhism as religion is already well equipped for the job.

It’s been doing it for over two thousand years, after all.

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galeriebalier · 4 years

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Le bouddhisme a eu au cours de l'Histoire un impact fondamental sur la littérature et l'art chinois, et fait partie intégrante de la culture chinoise. L'esthétique est à la fois d'une forte particularité personnelle, et d'un caractère social indéniable, lié particulièrement à la foi et à la culture, tout aussi bien en Occident qu'en Chine. Le Maître Fa Zang analysera la valeur d'une peinture ou d'une oeuvre d'art en général et échangera avec le public. L'intervention du Maître Fa Zang est en chinois et interprété en français. Les échanges animés par Tjeri Liu. Intervenant Maître Fazang Né à Beitou en Taiwan et diplômé du département de Physique de l’Université ChengKung, Maître Fazang est le Maître de la quarante-sixième génération du courant Tiantai du bouddhisme. Il est l’abbé du Monastère des dix mille bouddhas de Nanxi à Tainan. Maître FaZang est souvent invité à intervenir au sein des universités et temples situés en Chine ou à l’étranger afin de partager son enseignement. Il intervient également dans les conférences internationales sur le bouddhisme. Maître Fazang a publié de nombreux ouvrages et articles tels que “L’initiation au bouddhisme du courant Tiantai”, “L’initiation aux préceptes bouddhistes”, “ Le sens profond du courant bouddhiste de la Terre pure”, « Les Septs essences du bouddhisme », etc. Partenaires : – Le Temple dix-mille bouddhas, à Qixi, Taiwan (台湾楠西万佛寺) – Linh Son Culture and Education Foundation(法国巴黎新灵山寺)（在 Galerie Francis Barlier） https://www.instagram.com/p/B5I_P-RIjSV/?igshid=jbsxtl1zjmfr

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listentotheland · 6 years

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Lung Du Yung Jing Rinpoche : You are not the only person who is listening to the Buddhism 龙德上师：听佛法，不是只有自己在听 │Guan Yin Shan Chunghwa Da Bei Fazang Buddhist Association Global Website http://fazang.org/ │Auspicious Land - LINE Official Account https://ift.tt/2rjm3oW │Subscribe Chunghwa Da Bei Fazang Youtube Channel http://ppt.cc/YQ5E

#IFTTT #Vimeo #art 360 #listening to the land

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writepath · 7 years

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Thirty-one

To See the World in a Grain of Coltan

In a theatre near London’s Leicester Square, comedian Stewart Lee scolded the audience, the so-called metropolitan liberal elite, for blithely buying phones containing conflict minerals like coltan. We laughed at the absurdity, but this is not fiction. Frequently our behaviour is at odds with our values. Individualism and the unthinking consumerism it begets are doing damage. On reflection, we need to see - indeed feel - the interconnectedness of the global economy, because only then will we act together to overhaul it. ‘Business as usual’ is unethical and therefore unacceptable. A new and honest narrative about the true cost of our petrol and phones is needed if we are to live the values we claim to hold. If we are not free to buy products that are morally untainted, to what extent are we really free?

Individualism underpins much of our philosophy in the West. Much of what we consume is tainted, because concern for profit trumps regard for other people. To change this, activism and cooperation will be needed. In his recent book Blood Oil, Leif Wenar explains how products like petrol are some of the last remnants of the ‘might makes right’ political economy. It doesn’t matter how brutally oppressive you are: if you can build a fence around an oil well, secure it (and the pipeline) with guns, you can legally sell the ‘black gold’ on the global market. In the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Columbia, this applies to the mining of coltan – a mineral needed for phone capacitors. In this context, Leif Wenar outlines the ethical imperative that in a true democracy the people, not militias or cartels, should have control over their natural resources.

This material history of the stuff we buy is veiled by politicians who are in thrall to Gross Domestic Product. Thanks to the insight of mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, we can avoid this fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which mistakes wealth for the public good. Economic theory may be used to justify the system, but we know that our petrol consumption feeds dictatorships and we hold products that were clawed from the earth by the bare hands of exploited children. While our material wealth all-too-often depends on the poverty of others, Leif Wenar’s counsel is not one of despair. Indeed, he reminds us that consumer activism and collective action were instrumental in ending the injustices of the past.

We are encouraged by our governments to be individualistic. Buying the latest phone and myriad similar purchases – these acts are essential to our economies. But according to psychologists, we might be happier if we spent less on objects and more on experiences – this is because experiences connect us with other people, and it is in our relationships that we tend to find happiness. If we told a more honest and sympathetic story about the people at the other end of the iPhone supply chain, we might wish to improve that relationship.

Pressured by the politics of Thatcher, Reagan and their progeny, many of us have lost touch with just how interconnected we are. We are mistaken if we believe it is a Hobbesian world in which all things are individual, unique and singular. Dualistic thinking is also misguided: developed countries distinct from those still developing; Us versus Them; you are either with us or against us. The Tang-dynasty Chinese Buddhist philosopher Fazang captured our reality more accurately:

All is one, because all are the same in lacking an individual nature; one is all, because cause and effect follow one another endlessly.

We can see this in commerce and trade, and in the very objects we buy. Our smartphones encapsulate not only coltan, but also this truth of interconnectedness. The phone is a phone because of each of the parts that make it up (‘all is one’), and the coltan capacitor is what it is because it is part of the phone (‘one is all’). Things are relational. All stuff is what it is due to context, contingent on other stuff.

Similarly, we can ask the question ‘Who am I?’ I’m a father, husband, brother, taxpayer, teacher and consumer. Each of these attributes is relational: I’m a father because I have a son; I’m a consumer because I have an income with which to buy goods produced by others. These things I am related to are also defined by me. People are mining the coltan under brutal conditions, because I (and millions of others) demand iPhones.

Philosopher Bryan W. Van Norden humorously uses gravity to show there is even a relation between his pet dog and Charon, the largest of the moons of Pluto. But bring human agency into these relations and we get to the serious point that our consumerism has a material impact on the lives of other people.

History teaches us that consumer activism can change these structures. The dynamics are as pertinent today as they were during the transatlantic slave trade. In Fazang’s terms, cause and effect followed one another endlessly when West Africans were enslaved by Europeans – relational repercussions connected millions of others to the evil of the slave ships and the cotton fields. Products like sugar became morally tainted. We should view modern goods like petrol and coltan in a similar way. We should acknowledge the connection. Leif Wenar writes about how people in Britain came to face their consumer complicity in the enslavement of people from West Africa:

The richest members of the British parliament owned slave plantations, and the Church of England had such extensive holdings that the Church’s brand (burnt into the slaves’ chests) was recognized on every Caribbean island. The leaders of the first modern consumer boycott—the boycott against slave sugar—tried to punch through their day’s “business as usual” by connecting consumers mentally to the slaves.

In 1791, the campaigner William Fox pulled no punches in his persuasion. He felt people should really sense the repercussions of their consumption. If we purchase the commodity, he said, we participate in the crime. He added, ‘In every pound of sugar used … we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh.’

Today, we need to connect mentally with the people who suffer to bring products we desire to market. It is a failure of the imagination to not see that cheap, plentiful supply is often related to the subjugation of others. Only when we feel the connection will we act together. Our economies still run on tainted products. And as consumers, we feel trapped. Our wish to live ethically is in tension with the practical necessity of sustaining our life-styles. Very often, Wenar reminds us, we are ‘bringing home products made with resources forcibly taken from some of the most violated people in the world.’

In terms of our values, individualistic consumerism is a luxury we cannot afford. Even if the price of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance can be borne, the injustice and misery at the other end of the supply chain is indefensible. The public good, indeed the global good, should be on our minds. Thinkers like Lee, Van Norden and Wenar are encouraging us to examine our lives and the stuff we fill them with. When our material possessions depend on the brutalisation of others, we have a stark choice: business as usual or build new relationships. For just as people abroad should have democratic control of their resources, so we should be free to buy blood-free phones.

References

Leif Wenar, Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World, Oxford University Press, 2016.

Bryan W. Van Norden, Foreword by Jay L. Garfield, Taking Back Philosophy, A Multicultural Manifesto, Columbia University Press, 2017.

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gnartell · 7 years

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In each of the lion's eyes, in its ears, limbs, and so forth, down to each and every single hair, there is a golden lion. All the lions embraced by each and every hair simultaneously and instantaneously enter into one single hair. Thus, in each and every hair there are an infinite number of lions... The progression is infinite

Fazang (643-712)

#Fazang #philosophy #Buddhism #Indra's net #metaphor #infinity #quote

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starryskysakura · 2 years

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Learn more, the knowledge will be yours, let your wisdom grow and abundant

#guan yin shan #lung du yung jing rinpoche #guan yin shan fazang #fazang #guru lung du #lung du guru #觀音山 #guanyinshan #龍德上師 #龍德嚴淨仁波切 #gys

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starryskysakura · 2 years

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