#American Buddhism

[errantabbot]

130 Years of Zen in America

On this day in 1893 the World’s Parliament of Religions opened in Chicago. A subsidiary effort of the World’s Colombian Exposition (aka the “Chicago World’s Fair”), the Parliament was organized in large part part by the Swedenborgian layman Charles C. Bonney.

Among other things, the Parliament served as a substantial introduction of Eastern religion and philosophy to the west, with Swami Vivekananda offering a powerful address as a member of what he’d call one of the world’s “oldest orders of monks,” as a representative of the Hindu Vedanta tradition, introducing the dharmic traditions to America for the first time.

Importantly for me, and many of my colleagues, this event 130 years ago today also served as the formal date of introduction of the Zen Buddhist tradition to the West with “the Right Reverend Abbot” Soyen Shaku contributing as a representative of the Rinzai school (Soyen would return to America in 1905 and introduce the practice of koan zen to the west, with the teaching of Mrs. Alexander Russell). The Soto school would not formally land on American shores until the arrival of the Reverend Hosen Isobe in the early 1920’s, followed by Soyu Matsuoka Roshi in 1930, Taizan Maezumi Roshi in 1956, and Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1959.

Despite the socio-religious associated heinous events that would occur on September 11th 2001, 108 years later, the World’s Parliament of Religion served as an early vision of how the world could be, should we take time to see and hear one another instead of resigning to othering those who look or think differently than we do.

~Sunyananda

[jareckiworld]

Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973) — "Death of the Buddha" Homage to Pierre Louÿs [oil on canvas, 1942]

[engagedpureland]

On New Year's Eve an intruder broke into the Seattle Betsuin Buddhist Temple and set fire to the building. The arsonist struck in the basement archives, destroying irreplaceable records of over 120 years, instruments and other precious items used for major community festivals like Obon, and other important materials. Fire and water damage occurred throughout the building, but the main hall and columbarium survived. The fire reignited this week due to smouldering embers and was suppressed again. A relief fund for the temple has been created. Please go here to donate: https://donate.stripe.com/7sIcNfdwRdi59TW8wy

#buddhist #buddhism #jodoshinshu #shinbuddhism #arson #aapi #stopasianhate

[niishi]

"Zoro had no friends besides kuina" are johnny and yosaku just chopped liver??? Also any time we see zoro on his own, it's very obvious that he's good at making friends with literally anyone. Y'all don't understand Zoro. You're so desperate to find emo things about him that you make stuff up and completely ignore that he's very emotional and open and expressive in canon all on his own. Y'all just aren't used to seeing someone who regulates their emotions, express emotion.

[paper-ish]

i love how the atla fandom’s favourite pass time is writing thinkpieces about how aangs final moral dilemma that came from nowhere was him honouring his culture based off of an orientalist understanding of dharmic non-violence that’s rebutted within the text of the show itself anyways

[wisdom-and-such]

Excerpt from An Interesting Book— more at AnInterestingBook.com

[littlestpersimmon]

Twitter made me a buddhist, I'm sorry nothing has made me see Samsara clear as day as the way these bitches think........ have fun in the cycle tho, I'm out

[areadersquoteslibrary]

"Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—  a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity. may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. And that is what actually happened: both religions encountered a situation in which the will had become diseased, giving rise to a demand that had become utterly desperate for some "thou shalt." Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus they offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing, some delight in willing. For fanaticism is the only "strength of the will" that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant—  which the Christian calls his faith. Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes “a believer.''"

- Friedrich Nietzsche,

'The Gay Science'

347. Believers and Their Need to Believe

[piosplayhouse]

My god some of you people are WHITE white huh!!!! I just want to know what your thought process is behind saying that the mdzs world has "no legal framework or religion".. I'm just. I'm shellshocked I'm sorry

[mbrainspaz]

I probably know more about Tibetan Buddhism than your average american christian nationalist knows about the post-biblical history of christianity.

[staledirt87]

No stop my world history teacher is trying so hard

So at the beginning of the semester on the world religion notes it listed Buddhism as a non-theist religion so I was like "hey, Buddhism isn't a religion," and he was like "ok yeah my bad I don't know that much about it."

Flashforward, end of the semester, and it's the final review. One of the questions was "what do each of these have in common: Hinduism, atheism, and confucianism." The answer was "they don't worship a god," and I was like "woah wait hold up, huh?"

So I go up to him again and I'm like "btw Hinduism has hundreds of gods in their pantheon, you might be thinking of Buddhism," and he was like "oh yeah you right lemme fix that."

Which like, I get it, American education, on the curriculum, but he could have at least learned that distinction? But oh well, I don't think I can get too caught up since I practice neither.

[eelhound]

"At a time in which a broad sense of powerlessness is increasingly being shared amongst Americans, in relation to the environment, our politics, and the economy, how should we relate to one another? What we tend to have now is mutual intolerance and culture war hate, which only propels the status quo. What we need is radical acceptance and compassion. 

To 'radically accept' does not mean we should forgo our morals, accept bad politics, or ignore violence and oppression, but instead to recognize that hate is almost always born out of trauma and wounding, and that hating hate only begets more hate. As James Baldwin once wrote, 'I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.'

In the emergent field of psychedelic therapy — which has proven remarkably effective at treating addiction, depression, and other chronic conditions, while posing little to no addictive risk itself — a treatment modality known as Internal Family Systems [IFS] is increasingly being used to strengthen the benefits of a psychedelic trip. IFS operates on the assumption that there is no such thing as a unitary self, but instead that we are composed of a variety of 'parts,' which exist in relation to each other. In essence, IFS proposes that we 'contain multitudes,' to quote poet Walt Whitman. One 'part' of you may feel like a loving parent, where another personifies your inner race car driver. In a healthy and secure place, these subpersonalities resonate and sing together, making us living embodiments of inner diversity. But when the body experiences trauma, certain 'parts' can become frozen in time, or repressed, leading others to abandon their natural roles in an effort to protect or even shame the 'exiled' parts. As a result, friction, imbalance, pain, and disharmony afflicts the entire system.

It is interesting to think about American trauma through the lens of Internal Family Systems, to consider the cultural narratives that scaffold our pain and the formative wounds that haunt the present day — many of which have largely been forgotten. If the collective American psyche took a heroic dose and reckoned with its history, good lord, who knows what would come out? A revolution? A protest? A giant comical fart?

But we aren’t ready for that. No, not even close. We haven’t even learned how to sit with ourselves and be quiet.

In some ways we are no more free than Pavlov’s dog. In others we can choose how to inform and condition our minds."

- Vinnie Rotondaro, from "How We Can Ease the Pain." Current Affairs, 12 September 2022.

[17yearcicada]

love WINS my grandfather has SO many books about buddhist philosophy he's letting me borrow :]

[wisdom-and-such]

"the distinction ....[of] kings and subjects … how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into"

-- Thomas Paine in his Essay (or Political Pamphlet) ‘Common Sense’

[gildedbearediting]

World Poetry Day

Another day, another thing to celebrate. March 21 is World Poetry Day, and with that in mind, I’d like to take a look at poets and poetry. While I could talk at length about William Shakespeare or William Butler Yates, I’d rather search through other voices. Voices like Matsuo Bashō, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Sara Teasdale, and Gabriela Mistral. Matuso Bashō was one of the…

[goshashka-design]

A Cosmic Dance of Symmetry