Dispatches from the Eccentric Frontier

So my sangha has become a 501(c)(3) organization, looking to accomplish more in the community and perhaps get some permanent quarters for meditation. One of my fellow Zen practitioners was remarking on the difficulty of finding a place in Sunnyvale, due to the high property prices there. My suggestions for avoiding the problem:

• The Sanghamobile! Get an old bus, retrofit it for biodiesel, rip out the seats and put down zafus and zabutons. Give it a Twitter feed like a food truck so people know when it will be in the neighborhood if they want to meditate. “If you want to order nothing, we deliver!” It could even provide a “meditate while you commute” service up to San Francisco and back.
• Zendo bouncy castle! Just let people know via social media where it will be inflated for today’s meditation and service.
• Augmented reality temple! Just get enough Google Glasses for everyone and turn on the “Zen temple” overlay. One could make all kinds of points about emptiness there.

• It is not the custom of monks to ride Mardi Gras floats, shouting “show me your Zen” and throwing prayer beads.
• If you meet the Buddha on the road, you are not supposed to kill him for his treasure and XP.
• The Three Jewels are not the Buddha’s treasure type.
• There is no such thing as a Half-Buddha, Dire Buddha, or Werebuddha.

I recently joined Fitocracy, a social-networking site where you can log your workouts for your friends to see (and comment on and praise— the UI has it as “giving props”). It doesn’t keep track of calories for you (or have a nifty GPS app) like Endomondo, but it does have a motivation system based in video games. One aspect is that it awards you experience points, both for your activities (e.g.: an hour of vinyasa-flow yoga is worth 180 points), and for milestones (it gives you 20 points the first time you do much swimming, 50 points when you put in some distance, 200 points the first time you break 750m) it labels as “quests”. And, like all role-playing games, you level up when you get enough experience points. (There are also “achievements” corresponding to video game trophies, such as “I Seem to be Lost”, which is awarded when your lifetime running distance goes over 20 miles. I haven’t earned one yet, so I don’t know if they come with experience points.)

It’s still in beta— I can invite you, if you wish— and doesn’t have anything fancy to go with the leveling up. But it gives both the “I want to level up!” gamer motivation as well as the “I want to keep up with my friends” social one, which is a good start. If you’re already on there, I’m mithriltabby.

And forty minutes of sitting zazen is worth two points, so you can use it to keep track of how much meditation you do as well.

• There is no such thing as a “bodhi hammer” that induces enlightenment when whacked on someone’s head.
• The lump depicted on top of the Buddha’s head was not raised by a bodhi hammer.
• The Buddha did not sit under a pipal tree for 49 days because a cat had fallen asleep in his lap.

On Twitter, BuddhistHulk has been making a number of LOLisattvas lately. The LOLisattva depiction of Palden Lhamo reminded me that Buddhist Hulk introduced himself as a “MODERN DAY FIERCE DHARMA PROTECTOR”, a dharmapāla— a notion out of Vajrayana Buddhism that there are wrathful deities (which could be anything from an ancient hill spirit to an emanation from a powerful bodhisattva) ready to battle the opponents of Buddhism. Buddhist Hulk takes his icon from a Tibetan artist depicting pop culture icons in traditional form, including one picture of the Incredible Hulk as a dharma protector. So we have ancient deities and modern superheroes reflecting off one another here— we can take it one step further for use in a role-playing game.

In a supernatural timeline, the exile of the Dalai Lama from Tibet in 1959 might have caused a number of dharmapālas that had previously been tied to monasteries to be turned loose upon the world, just in time for the Silver Age of Comic Books. A spirit might take on a human form with mask and cape initially, then pop out in their most terrifying form when the time comes to strike fear in the hearts of criminals. The open-ended goal of a bodhisattva to liberate all sentient beings provides an easy plot hook for bringing in such a character as a good guy or helpful NPC. A character could be portrayed as ancient and worldly-wise, or freshly arrived from the hinterlands with lots of chances to make comical mistakes about modern culture. In a game like Feng Shui, the character would probably be a Supernatural Creature with the Transformation schtick to allow them to pretend to be a human being when not actively battling evil.

Regarding LOLisattvas, BuddhistHulk and I had an exchange:

• mithriltabby: All dharmas are LOLdharmas.*
• BuddhistHulk: SENSE OF HUMOUR IS ELEVENTH PARAMI.

* This is a reference to “All dharmas are Buddha-dharmas”, a quote from the Diamond Sūtra.

Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between is the fourth book from Brad Warner, dubbed both the “Porno Buddhist” (for blogging about Buddhism at the alt-porn site Suicide Girls) and “Buddhism’s enfant terrible”. Warner notes that no one has yet produced a book on the Buddhist perspective on modern issues in sex and relationships, and sets out to give his Hardcore Zen perspective on the matter. It includes a long and interesting interview with pornographic actress Nina Hartley, who shows a much stronger claim on the title “Porno Buddhist”. The writing varies from earnestly serious to hilariously irreverent, and he shows what I see as a sensible approach to everything from masturbation to BDSM. Like his other books, it stands on its own without requiring material from the others; this could serve as a (possibly shocking) introduction to Buddhist thought by showing how it reflects on familiar issues.

...when you’re trying to let go of one hilarious thought that wants to keep coming back for the lulz, instead of just letting go of whatever random things flit through your brain at a given time. Especially when the next thought up is trying to explain it to the people whose meditations you’re disturbing as you chuckle. When the images in question are this or this.

The full title of the book is Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye, and true to his irreverent punk background, Warner wastes no time in getting to joking about the Left Dharma Eye before the reader can. This is a good follow up to Hardcore Zen, with Warner’s take on the Buddhist perspective on numerous big philosophical issues.

Warner keeps up the level of clarity from his first book. He does a good job of bringing metaphors that were current a thousand years ago into the present day, and can dig right into linguistic subtleties like kanji choice in a Japanese source text that would be easy to miss in a translation. He gets into some more esoteric perspectives, some of which I didn’t really get— for example, he explained the twelve folds of the Twelvefold Chain well, but utterly lost me on the supposed “therefore” connections between them, and it looks like I’m missing something about the no-ego-all-is-one viewpoint. I suspect this will be worth a re-read after I do more zazen. (A lot more zazen.)

Some months ago, yanfali and I took an introductory class at the local Chung Tai Zen Center, and last night I finally made time to drop by Bamboo in the Wind to get an opportunity to contrast different approaches to Zen.

The class at Chung Tai was very informative, covering a lot of the basics; it consisted of an hour of meditation (mostly sitting, some walking; I dubbed the latter “Zen marching band” as they followed the Chinese approach of taking each step to the sound of a wooden fish being struck at irregular intervals) followed by an hour of lecture. The Abbot, Jian Hu, is good at explaining, keeping a good balance of knowledge and humor; while he doesn’t try to hide that he’s here teaching because his master asked him to do it and would be happier meditating and studying the sutras in solitude, he’s doing a good job. The setting there is fairly formal; it didn’t really engage my interest.

Bamboo in the Wind is much less formal; it’s run by Rev. Val Szymanski, who recently leveled up to “Dharma Heir”. They meet in a Unitarian chapel, where there are plenty of Western-style chairs for people who aren’t up for the Japanese-style cushions, and the congregants used both. (They even have vernier cushions if you want to try a half lotus but you’re not flexible enough to get both knees to the cushion comfortably; my legs were nowhere near as numb after 40 minutes of sitting.) The session was pretty much as on the web site: 40 minutes of sitting, 10 minutes walking (no sound to call the steps), 10 minutes of service, and about half an hour of freewheeling discussion using a couple of lines from the Heart Sutra as a seed crystal.

Both places are friendly and welcoming, but I prefer the very casual atmosphere at Bamboo in the Wind.