visiting the Bodhisattva (aka Statue) of Liberty

I thought this would be a good opportunity to get back on the Dhamma Track and share with you the Mahayana vow of the Bodhisattva…

I will strive for as long as Samsara endures to liberate all sentient beings from Samsara and lead them to enlightenment.

The key word here, as must of us have found out, is strive. If it were as simple to liberate all sentient beings from Samsara as it is to take the vow, we would all have been liberated soon after the vow was first uttered!

I'd already conceptualized this post on the flight to New York, so I almost dropped my camera when I saw this poster on display in the museum! Apparently, Miss Liberty was already well aware of the vow and well along the path of a Bodhisattva... ^_^

This reminded me of little, low quality, Buddha amulets you can buy in tourist traps and temple shops (not to entirely connect the two) around Asia.

Two individuals for whom I would give a great deal to, one day, share liberation with.

My Uncle and Aunt. Two Bodhisattva in disguise!

We Love NY! *^^*

I’d been to the statue when I was 10, and climbed all the way to the crown. You need special passes now, and you can’t bring a baby. I remember feeling like it was so high up. Later that day, we went up the World Trade Center. The Statue of Liberty looked like a tiny figurine poking up from the water.

Autumn in New York

perhaps my favorite New York song, sung by my favorite singer:

New York City

flying into New York City

One of the first Buddhist teachings I stumbled across was how as soon as we see someone approaching, we immediately begin forming ideas based only on our own prejudice. We make assumptions based on clothes, hair, style, skin tone… Whether it is positive or negative, we do it, without realizing it. Walking through the streets and avenues of New York City this week, the stereotypes of New York (or New Yorkers) that are commonly heard didn’t present themselves at all. People have been helpful, polite, and friendly everywhere we’ve been. I haven’t taken EunBong and Fina into any rough neighborhoods, but even in the busiest places, we only saw one person yelling at a cab driver, and I only heard someone call someone else an assh*le once. We still have a few days left in the city, but we’ve yet to see any middle fingers flashed out of windows of anything like that. My mind wants to compare New York City to Seoul, since that’s where I spend most of my time, and without saying anything negative about Soeul, New York seems quiet (you don’t hear traffic blaring), organized, relatively clean, and rather sane. It’s busy, it can be hard to catch your breath at first, but it’s an amazing city. I kind of see New York as a place of countless potential koans. You can make out of it anything you desire. When you’re done, go get a slice of pizza and a piece of cheese cake!

Of all the “New York” songs, I always thought this one captures it the best!

somewhere I used go…

In university, I studied Fine Arts with a focus in printmaking. What I was best at and enjoyed the most was intaglio (the ‘g’ is silent), etching zinc or copper with nitric acid to create a texture that would then hold ink to be transfered onto paper. While I’ve been home, i started visiting the printshop in town where I first learned intaglio before I left for university. I was rusty and forgot a lot, but somethings still remained. I had it in mind to do a sort of traditional Korean painting style print, so I covered the plate in a rosin powder, heated it until it bonded to the zinc to create a texture for the acid to bite around, then painted my image on with a ’sugar lift’ solution. It’s sugar water with a bit of high quality India ink so you can see it. When the sugar lift is dry, I painted on a thin coat of liquid hard ground, a waxy material, dissolved in solvent, that resists the nitric acid, keeping the zinc plate from being eaten.

Once the ground was dry, I ran it under cold water until the sugar began to dissolve, lifting the ground, and leaving an open space for the acid to do it’s job. After a few minutes bathing in the acid, it’s ready to be cleaned off, proofed, and reworked until the plate is ready for printing. Since it’s a print, much like a stamp, the final image is in reverse. I was actually more pleased with the image as it was painted in sugar, but the results weren’t too bad for my first plate in six years. It’s an image I’ll probably work with for a while and see what evolves from it. It’s based on a small hermitage I used to stop at on my way up and down the trail to Gatbawi in Palgongsan. I always loved the little images on Thai amulets but was also influenced by the art work in Hanmaeum’s A Thousand Hands of Compassion.

 

A few more breaths with Sandima

It’s almost time to start packing for the long trip back to Korea. I’m always glad to be going back to Korea, even though I’m always glad to have a break from it when the time comes to leave. It feels like home now just as much as anywhere else.

When I left Korea, I’d just started studying Vipassanna with Sandima Bhikku. We made our plans to come to Korea just after meeting him, so I didn’t get very far. In the end, during our visits, he taught EunBong more than I learned which I thought was more beneficial since EunBong hadn’t been exposed to much more than devotion to GwanSaeEum Bosal. She was interested to learn theories about Kamma and how we can improve our Kamma by helping others.

What we went over together wasn’t really anything I hadn’t been exposed to, but it’s the kind of thing you can always benefit from hearing again. There was an extra quality in the teachings when it came from a person face to face instead of a book or a clip on YouTube. Sandima had a nice way of explaining things that helped open your understanding. His warmth and friendliness made being with him very comfortable. When he taught, he didn’t act as though he was above us, he was aware that what he was teaching was just as important for him to follow as the rest of us.

Over and over, he repeated that the most important thing was to understand the theory before starting the practice. It could be why I’d found myself lost on my own. I was going through the motions but not truly understanding what I was doing. I would find myself sitting with no focus, lost in thought or gone with no attention to where. At these times I realized the limitations of learning from a book.

Sandima spoke a lot about Kamma, as I mentioned a few months back. He explained how we are surrounded by the energy of our Kamma. Kamma is one of those things you can’t worry about too much as far as your past is concerned, but by being mindful in the present moment you can ensure that whatever Kamma you generate will be positive. Meditation, chanting, acting with mindfulness and compassion are excellent ways to maintain positive Kamma. Do I succeed at these from moment to moment in my own life? No, but even if once in five times I can stop myself from negative action or speech, remembering my teaching, then my Kamma is a fifth better than if I hadn’t heard the teachings at all! Swatting flies is a basic example. How many of us give it a second thought before smacking a house fly or a mosquito as it’s sinking its needle into our flesh? I still catch myself swiping my hand through the air without a thought  in mind, sometimes soon enough to veer off and miss or other times at least in enough time to be glad I missed. As far as my understanding of Kamma goes, the more often I remind myself not to swat the fly, the more likely I’ll be to remind myself the next time. Hopefully, after enough times, the thought of killing the fly will eventually stop arising. There is a strong connection between Kamma and habit, which makes a lot of sense. Sandima made an analogy that we are like little caterpillars climbing a tree. First the head goes forward, then the body follows. Like that, our Kamma energy goes first, then our mind and body follow. Like cause and effect we follow our Kamma.

I asked about chanting in Theravada practice. In Korea, I’d grown accustomed to chanting Namo Amitaba, Gwan Sae Eum Bosal, or a few other Bosal names, now and then, that don’t have a presence in Theravada tradition. He replied that it’s common to chant the different qualities of the Buddha that one wishes to manifest in themselves. For example, if he were preparing to teach a class, he might chant the Pali word for right speech. The most usual chant, Sandima told me, is Arahant, one who has all the qualities of a Buddha. In contrast to Korean chanting (at least according to Sandima, as Marcus kindly pointed out), Theravada chanting is/should be done in silence. I don’t think one or the other is better, but there is a difference. Sandima simply explained that, in Therevada practice, silence is prefered.

He spoke a bit about the nine qualities of a Buddha and the seven delusions that cause Samsara. To start, it’s important to know your position between total ignorance and being an Arahant. With a big smile, he looked at us and asked, “I’m a crazy fool, how about you?” His point was, if you start thinking that you are more advanced than you are, you won’t be able to learn what you need to know. To cultivate the nine qualities requires contemplation, mindfulness, and listening. You must start with knowing, with wisdom. Knowing comes from touch, from the five aggregates. Knowing starts with breathing.

> visiting Sandima <

Dhamma Blues

Over all, I’ve been decent at dealing with attachment to physical possessions in my life. I guess my biggest problem is that I get carried away with the things I do have. Since moving to Seoul in October, 2006, I’ve collected nearly two dozen Chinese tea pots, I had a pile of over two dozen malas (I gave many of them away before leaving Korea) laying amongst a dozen various Buddha statues throughout my apartment. When I first moved to Korea in 2005, the hardest thing to leave behind was my vinyl records that, at one point ,numbered in the five thousands. I’d narrowed it down to the best 3000 or so, and since I’ve been home, sorted out about another 1000 I can do without. My blues, Jazz, Folk, and Classical albums are the ones I’m still the most attached to.

Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to transfer as many as I can to mp3, through my little mp3 player I bought in Daegu a few years ago. EunBong hasn’t entirely been impressed with the amount of time I’ve spent flipping records on the turntable, but I have found a few classical pieces she can use for teaching and a really amazing recording of Swan Lake (her favorite ballet) that she said is better than any she’d heard before.

Though I’m always more likely to put on a Jazz album, my favorite songs are always old Delta Blues recordings and depression-era Folk records. What I appreciate so much about them is that they understood suffering on a level I wouldn’t care to experience but there always seems to be a silver lining in the end. One of the most famous blues lines is, “the sun’s gonna shine in my backdoor someday.” I can’t think of any better imagery coming from a group of singers whose lives were beat down so hard for so long. A former co-worker once told me that the Blues is the most honest, “tell it like it is” music there is. It’s really amazing to listen to it now and hear themes that are very similar to Buddhist teachings I’ve learned in Asia.

Last week, I was going through my Woody Guthrie albums. My favorite record of his is a collection of depression songs, called Dust Bowl Ballads”, he wrote about when he and his family had to pack up and leave their farm to look for work elsewhere. They ended up on a “Jungle Camp” which probably wasn’t much different from a refugee camp we’d see on the news today in a war-torn country somewhere. Two of the songs on the album were written after Guthrie watched the film, The Grapes of Wrath. Near the end of the first song, there’s a line (I don’t know if it’s from Guthrie or Steinbeck) that rings so much of non-duality and a little Bodhichita at the end, it almost gave me chills when I heard it sung by a scratchy, old folk singer on an even scratchier, old recording from the 1940s…

Ever’body might be just one big soul,
Well it looks that a-way to me.
Everywhere that you look, in the day or night,
That’s where I’m a-gonna be, Ma,
That’s where I’m a-gonna be.

Wherever little children are hungry and cry,
Wherever people ain’t free.
Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights,
That’s where I’m a-gonna be, Ma.
That’s where I’m a-gonna be.

Not too surprised to find it on YouTube… The verse is at the 6:07 mark, but, if you have time, the whole thing is pretty good! ^^

Baby’s Cry

Fina Bikkhuni

I once saw a documentary on the roar of tigers, how the low-frequency of the roar has the ability to paralyse its victims (humans included), giving them a chance to pounce.

Considering how things like this are tools of survival, I look at Fina. At just over five months old, her survival is still entirely dependant her parents. Her most useful tool to express her needs is her voice. I began wondering if her cry might have a similar use as the tiger’s roar, but with an opposite effect of forcing a reaction. There’s something about her cry that cuts right through my brain until I almost think I can feel my corpus callosum being vibrated. Probably not… but I can literally feel my eardrums vibrate, even during a relatively subdued cry. It presents itself as a seemingly impossible challenge in terms of keeping a still mind. Though I can’t control my initial reaction, especially when Fina hits that certain frequency, signaling that things have just hit a more serious level of not going well, what I have been able to work on is the level of stress that arrises along with it. Not that a crying baby shouldn’t be reacted to (there are plenty of other situations I can practice not reacting to!), I just wonder how much of the reaction is involuntary?

 

 

P.S.

Once again, I would like to emphasis how wonderful Fina has been, and how lucky EunBong and I are as parents. I don’t want anyone to think I’m complaining about her crying, I’ve just been observing my own mental reaction when she does get upset. As I stated in a previous post, mindfulness is something I really have to work on! That said, I could just as easily have written a post titled, “Babies Cry”!

 As for the picture, I was going to post one of her crying, but I figured posing her as a Theravada monk would be a lot cuter! She should probably be in white but, oh well…  ^^

pictures of Fina

up before the baby

 

Pick me UP!

 

Gwan Sae Eum Bosal, Gwan Sae Eum Bosal, Gwan Sae Eum Bosal...

morning exorcise

Are we going to the beach??

 

"Baroque is when you're out of Monet!"

 

Fina's best Bella Lugosi impersonation

 

*smack* *smack*

 

Spit Happens!

>more photos<

true experience

Fina experiencing a geranium

 I listened to Hyun Hyun Gak Sunim speak once at Hwa Gye Sa a week before Buddha’s Birthday celebrations in Seoul. Towards the end of the talk, an old man asked what “true experience” was. Hyun Gak Sunim raised his cup of coffee to his lips, took a long and noisy sip, then replied, “This coffee is bitter.”

Zen Master Seung San said something along the lines of, if you want to know what a watermelon is, you have to cut one open and take a bite!

were you right?

 

Thank you for letting me know it’s not my fault for not getting it, or even if I do.

with Ramesh Balsekar