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March
2002 Guide
March 3
108 Bows Ceremony
This month the 108 Bows ceremony will begin at 10:00 and end
at 10:30, comprised of the ceremony for honoring the 88 known
Buddhas of different time periods. The ceremony will be led
by Bro. Sunya.
March 16 workshop
Invigorate Your Practice Through
Chant!!!
A workshop on Paritta Chanting (the traditional Theravadan practice
of chanting for protection) will be offered by Ven. Havanpola
Shanti, IBMC’s Vice Abbot, on Saturday March 16 from 9:00
until noon. Ven. Shanti will discuss the historical background
of chanting as well as the fruitfulness of chant practice for
the modern Buddhist practitioner.
Workshop participants will be led in chanting the Metta Sutta
and the Maha Jaya Mangala Gatha (highest blessing sutta). This
workshop is recommended for both beginners and long time practitioners.
Plan Ahead for Workshops
Mark your calendar now for the next few workshops We are offering
one workshop a month.
On Saturday, April 27, Ven. Dr. Karuna Dharma will do a half-day
workshop, from 9-12, on An Introduction to the Vimalakirti Sutra.
This sutra is perhaps the most beloved Mahayana sutra, because
it demonstrates the fruitfulness of lay practice, wherein the
householder Vimalakirti bests Manjusri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom,
in a contest to see who understands most fully the entrance
into non-duality. The sutra combines humor and feminism as well,
and was one of three sutras translated into Japanese by the
great Buddhist prince Shotoku.
The workshop will look at the background of the sutra and examine
a few of its more important chapters.
Then on Saturday, June 29, Rev. Kusala Ratna Karuna will offer
a half-day workshop on setting up and maintaining a web page.
Vaisakha retreat
On May 16-18 IBMC is holding its Vaisakha weekend retreat, marking
the beginning of the summer training period, which will end
mid- September this year.
Buddhist Perspectives on Anger
by Rev. Jñana Karuna Vajra
To be human is to experience anger and to be seduced, to a greater
or lesser degree from time to time, by its powerful and destructive
force. To be a dedicated Buddhist is to acknowledge and recognize
anger when it arises for what it is and to pass beyond it without
clinging to it. The key is neither to fear it nor to idealize
it, but to find a middle path through anger with mindfulness.
We must be careful not to add to our brutal self-judgments because
of it, and not to act it out in ways that ultimately leave us
isolated and regretful. This is not an easy lesson to learn
or to continually re-learn and is even harder to put into practice.
Let me set the stage for what follows with a description of
a profound personal anger crisis that I recently experienced.
No matter how peaceful someone’s profession or occupation
may appear to an outsider, it is usually the case that everyone’s
job brings with it a high level of pressure, stress and anxiety.
Such is indeed the case in my profession as a librarian, with
significant administrative responsibilities, at U.S.C. My daily
workload is challenging on even a quiet day and such days are
few and far between. Working with an administrative superior
that is not a librarian on the one hand and who is frequently
seen as being in an unholy alliance with the forces of evil,
professionally speaking, makes for a terrible working environment.
I can cope and have coped with a great deal at my work over
the years, but working with and reporting to the particular
woman in question had reached the point of driving me to distinctly
non-Buddhist, not to mention illegal if carried out, fantasies
of action. Festering anger over the situation came to totally
dominate my relationship with this individual, to the detriment
of my own professional goals and accomplishments. The anger
led me to avoid meetings with her, to ignore her legitimate
concerns and to frequently speak badly about her to others.
This negative emotion came to dominate my days and nights, causing
me to lose sleep and frequently occasioning a slide into serious
depression when I found it difficult to get up in the morning
and to go to work to face another day of her existence in a
position of administrative power. In short, I was coming to
hate her. This was a terrible situation and it was likely only
going to get worse. Yet I had literally lost control of my mind
when anger was in control, much like a quote from the Anuguttara
Nikaya where anger is referred to as one of the Three Fires
or Poisons, along with desire or attachment and delusion: “the
fire of anger consumes those who have lost their minds through
anger”.
At about this time IBMC’s Monthly Guide for November appeared,
containing an interview with Thich Nhat Hanh on what he would
say to Osama bin Laden along with other Buddhist responses to
the acts of terrorism. As simple it sounds and indeed was, in
the course of reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s interview I experienced
what can only be described as a kind of epiphany in terms of
my Ipersonal anger crisis at work. Since Thich Nhat Hahn was
willing to listen to Osama bin Laden and to bring a drop of
compassion to that man’s hatred I was struck by the absurdity
of my continued harboring of such anger toward my boss. Nhat
Hahn’s message resonated deep within me that I needed to
bring compassion to our relationship, to learn to listen, really
listen, to where she was coming from. This is turn made it possible
for me to open up to her and provide her with the opportunity
to listen, ”really listen,” to me as well.
Almost immediately I felt as if an immense weight had been lifted
from me and that feeling has remained with me since then. Our
mutual working relationship will not always be comfortable but
it is now much more satisfactory and anger is no longer on the
agenda. I get irritated with her periodically but that is OK;
irritation is not anger and does not lead to hatred if you do
not deal with it. The experience I have just described is obviously
unique to me, though if you think back on your personal histories
you may well recollect some similar behavioral characteristics
in your past encounters. Quite possibly your most intense anger,
like mine, occurs when something most intimate to you, be it
emotional or professional, and fundamental to your value system
has been called into question or even betrayed.
Let us return to Thich Nhat Hahn for a moment with a brief quotation
from his book, Peace is Every Step, quoted in an issue of Tricycle:
“When we are angry, we are not usually inclined to return
to ourselves. We want to think about the person who is making
us angry, to think about his hateful aspects: his rudeness,
dishonesty, cruelty, maliciousness, and so on. The more we think
about him, listen to him, or look at him, the more our anger
flares. His dishonesty and hatefulness may be real, imaginary,
or exaggerated, but, in fact, the root of the problem is the
anger itself, and we have to come back and look first of all
inside ourselves. It is best if we do not listen to or look
at the person whom we consider to be the cause of our anger.
Like a fireman, we have to pour water on the blaze first and
not waste time looking for the one who set the house on fire.”
The subject of anger is addressed, of course, in the historic
Buddhist teachings though not necessarily at great length or
in great depth. One perspective is found in Buddhism’s
funda-mental equation: cause and effect. It is an understatement
to say that we allow ourselves to become angry because we find
some aspect of our personal reality unsatisfactory. Viewed most
simply and fundamentally the dissatisfaction leading to our
anger is but a form of suffering, the Buddha’s First Noble
Truth, or dukkha. Attachment and anger are clearly two sides
of the same coin. Anger does not always arise in isolation,
is not always restricted only to one’s self. One’s
anger can affect someone else, somehow, somewhere to a lesser
or greater degree. There is a price we pay for being attached
to a narrow view of being “right”. Without care and
awareness, small-minded feeling states can dominate the moment.
It happens all the time. The collective pain we cause others
and ourselves bleeds our souls. Within the Buddhist understanding
of interdependent origination, Indra’s net is all encompassing,
connecting all thoughts and all actions in the universe. Anger
can cause little ripples or big waves across that universe.
In the sutras anger is identified as one of the five hindrances
that must be abandoned before an arhat can progress to the dhyana
stages enroute to enlightenment. The Yogacarin school of Buddhism,
in its characteristic Indian passion for categorizing everything,
included anger as one of the six fundamental defilements, or
klesa, of associated mental functions. Aspects of anger are
found as well among the so-called minor auxiliary defilements:
wrath, enmity and causing injury. It is fortunate that we do
not live in a time of strict interpretation of the Mahayana
Precepts, as giving way to anger is one of the ten grave prohibitions.
Violation of any of the ten grave prohibitions is grounds for
expulsion from the sangha if the offender is ordained.
One of my favorite authors is Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I would
like to share with you some extended observations on anger from
his work, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation, which
presents an interesting and different kind of Buddhist perspective
on the subject:
“The hell realm is pervaded by aggression. This aggression
is based on such a perpetual condition of hatred that one begins
to lose track of whom you are building your aggression toward
as well as who is being aggressive toward you. There is continual
uncertainty and confusion. You have built up a whole environment
of aggression to such a point that finally, even if you were
to feel slightly cooler about your own anger and aggression,
the environment around you would throw more aggression at you.
It is like walking in hot weather: you might feel physically
cooler for a while, but hot air is coming at you constantly
so you cannot keep yourself cool.
The aggression of the hell realm does not seem to be your aggression,
but it seems to permeate the whole space around you. There is
no space in which to breathe, no space in which to act, and
life becomes overwhelmingÿ.
In the hell realm we throw out flames and radiations, which
are continually coming back to us. There is no room at all in
which to experience any spaciousness or openness. Rather there
is a constant effort, which can be very cunning, to close up
all the space. The hell realm can only be created through your
relationships with the outside world, whereas in the jealous
god realm your own psychological hang-ups could be the material
for creating the asura mentality. In the hell realm there is
a constant situation of relationship: you are trying to play
games with something and the attempt bounces back on you, constantly
recreating extremely claustrophobic situations; so that finally
there is no room in which to communicate at all.
At that point the only way to communicate is by trying to recreate
your anger. You thought you had managed to win a war of one-upmanship,
but finally you did not get a response from the other person;
you one-upped him right out of existence. So you are faced only
with your own aggression coming back at you and it manages to
fill up all the space. You are left lonely once more, without
excitement, so you seek another way of playing the game, again
and again and again. You do not play for enjoyment, but because
you do not feel protected nor secure enough. If you have no
way to secure yourself, you feel bleak and cold, so you must
rekindle the fire. In order to rekindle the fire you have to
fight constantly to maintain yourself. One cannot help playing
the game; one just finds oneself playing it, all the time.”
Trungpa presents a colorful, albeit heavy, description of what
serious anger is like. If you’ve been even remotely close
to it there is a lot to recognize in his account. On a more
earthbound level, anger is a self-centered emotion that clearly
can only arise in the mind of one who has not yet achieved the
state of non-sel or emptiness. In our self-centeredness we fail
to appreciate that those who are acting aggressively toward
us are only buying their own suffering, creating their own worse
predicament, through ignorance. Anger directed against ignorance
accom-plishes nothing, whereas responding to aggression with
com-passion and to anger with kindness will ultimately dissolve
the barriers between the offending other and the self, for they
are both one in reality.
It is certainly a challenge in the heat of the moment to mentally
step back and recognize the illusory quality of our anger and
the object of our rage. If we are able to develop a more spacious
state of mind, one that is not so reactive, we begin to realize
that things lack solidity, like a dream or illusion. This includes
anger, for there is nothing external to find there when we look
for it. Once we realize we cannot find it our mind can be, in
the energy of the moment, without attachment, without aversion
to what is happening at that moment.
I, like you, can read or listen to this advice but immense patience
and perseverance is required for each of us to follow it. Only
through continual, methodical application of these methods,
day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year, will we dissolve our
deeply ingrained habits. The process may take some time, but
we will change. Changing in a positive way requires discipline,
Thank you for you attention. May you be peaceful, happy and
well, and able to recognize and dwell fully in your anger when
it arises.
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Buddhism and God
A talk given by Rev. Kusala at a high school in Los Angeles
Why is it... The Buddha never talked about the One God of the
desert, the Judeo-Christian God? Does this mean that all Buddhists
are atheists and don’t believe in God? Did the Buddha believe
in God?
These are some of the questions I would like to try to answer
today.
The Buddha was born 500 years before Christ in India. His dad
was a king and his mom was a queen and his dad wanted him to
take over the family business (the kingdom) when he got older.
The kind of world the Buddha was born into was magical. Everything
seemed to be alive. The trees, mountains, lakes, and sky were
living and breathing with a variety of gods in charge. If you
needed rain you asked one god, if you needed it to stop raining
you asked another. The priests of India did all the religious
work for the people and got paid for it.
In India at the time of the Buddha, you became a priest if you
were born into the right family and not because of the school
you went too or the grades you got.
There were other kinds of religious people at the time of the
Buddha as well. These were men who left their family, friends,
and jobs to find the answers of life. They would practice meditation
and renunciation. They were called mendicants, something like
a religious beggar.
There are many kinds of meditation in which you think about
only one thing, like looking at a candle or saying a word over
and over. When your mind becomes focused on just one thing,
you experience the essence of happiness. Even if you're sitting
in the rain on a cold day, you're still content. The essence
of happiness is always within you.
Renunciation is when you give up the things that make your life
comfortable. Sometimes you buy things to make yourself happy
and comfortable, thinking your happiness and comfort are dependent
on the kind of stuff you own.
In the Buddha’s time, there were a lot of people who gave
up their stuff and became mendicants. They wanted to be uncomfortable
so they could understand suffering. And when they could see
their own discomfort clearly, they understood happiness was
not dependent on the things they owned, but the life they lived.
Even all the gods in India could not end the suffering of one
human being.
At the age of 29 the Buddha stopped praying to the gods to end
his suffering and the suffering of others. He left his family
and friends, went to the edge of the forest, took off all his
clothes and jewelry, covered his naked body with rags of cloth,
cut off his hair and started to meditate and practice renunciation.
He became a mendicant, and It took him six years of hard work
and much suffering, but in the end he was able to stop his suffering
forever (Nirvana) and help others stop their suffering as well.
Did the Buddha believe in God, the One God of the desert, the
God of the Christians, Jews and Muslims?
Well... No... He didn’t... Monotheism (only one God) was
a foreign concept to the Buddha, his world was filled with many
gods not just one.
At the time of the Buddha, the only people who practiced the
religion of the One God of the desert were the Jews. Remember
it was still 500 years before Christ came into the world and
the Buddha never left India. The Buddha walked from village
to village... In his entire life he never went any further than
200 miles from his birthplace.
The Buddha never met a Jew... And because of this, he never
said anything about the One God of the desert.
There is also nothing in the teachings of the Buddha that suggest
how to find God or worship the gods of India, even though the
Buddha himself was a theist (believed in gods). The Buddha was
more concerned with the human condition... Birth, sickness,
old age and death. The Buddhist path is about coming to a place
of acceptance with those aspects of life and not suffering through
them.
Please be clear on this point... The Buddha is not thought of
as a god in Buddhism and is not prayed too. He was a human being
who found perfection in Nirvana and became perfectly moral,
perfectly ethical, and ended his suffering forever.
Does that mean that every Buddhist in the world is an atheist?
No!!! I have met a lot of Buddhists who believe in God. I have
met a lot of Buddhists who don’t believe in God... And
a lot of Buddhists just don’t know.
All three points of view are OK if you’re Buddhist because
suffering is more important than God in Buddhism.
Sometimes a student will ask me how everything in this world
got started... "If you don’t have God in Buddhism
then who or what caused the universe?"
When the Buddha was asked how the world started, he kept silent.
In the religion of Buddhism we don’t have a first cause,
instead we have a never ending circle of birth and death. In
this world and in all worlds, there are many beginnings and
ends. The model of life used in Buddhism has no starting place...
It just keeps going and going.
Now having said that... If you’re a Buddhist it’s
OK to believe God was the first cause... It really doesn't go
against the teachings of the Buddha, his focus was on suffering...
It's also OK to believe science has the answer… Like the
big bang theory, etc... Some Buddhist’s don’t even
care how it all started, and that’s fine too. Knowing how
the world started is not going to end your suffering, it’s
just going to give you more stuff to think about.
I hope you're able to see that God is not what Buddhism is all
about... Suffering is... And if you want to believe in God,
as some Buddhists do, I suppose it's OK. The Buddha never said
there wasn’t a God. He never said anything at all about
God... Because the Buddha never met a Jew.
March Events...
Sunday Talks
3/3 A Morning of Chanting and Meditation
11am Rev. Kusala Ratna Karuna
3/10 Our Egos and Irrational Fears
11am Ven. Dr. Karuna Dharna
3/17 Paritta Chanting
11am Ven. Havanpola Shanti
3/24
11am Rev. Jñana Karuna Vajra
3/31 How I Became Unenlightened
11am Rev. Maitri Dasi Karuna
Classes at IBMC
Mon History of Zen Buddhism
7pm Rev. Vajra Karuna (Thich Tam-Thi)
Wed Meditation Discussion & Practice
7pm Rev. Kusala Ratna Karuna(Thich TamThien)
Thur Pali Chanting
6:30pm Rev. Havanpola Shanti
Fri Certificate Course in Buddhist Studies
6pm Dr. Warnisuriya
Special Events
3/3 108 Bows Ceremony, 10 am
3/16 Workshop on Pali Chanting
9-12 Ven. Havanpola Shanti
Meditation times
Tuesday and Thursday mornings 6:30-7:00 am
Wed evening: 7-9 pm, led by Rev. Kusala
Friday, 7:30-9 pm, led by Rev. Kusala
IBMC web page is found at: InternationalBuddhistMeditationCtr.org
IBMC’s email: IBMC@InternationalBuddhistMeditationCtr.org
Ven. Karuna’s email: Karunadh@earthlink.net
Ven.Karuna’s web page: www.karunadharma.org
Ven. Shanti’s email: Hshanti@earthlink.net
Ven. Sumana & Rev. Dhammasara’s email: Sumana82@Hotmail.com
Rev. Kusala’s email: Kusala@kusala.org
Rev. Kusala’s web pages: www.kusala.org
www.Urbandharma.org
Rev. Vajra’s email: Madmonk88@aol.com
Rev. Jñana’s email: Lsipe@usc.ed
Rev. Maitridasi’s email: Dharmagal@aol.com
Bro. Sunya’s email: Heartlandzen@Yahoo.co
Bro. Ksanti and Bro.Sraddha’s email: VictorTom@aol.com
Sr. Hanasi’s email: Hasanakaruna@aol.com
Bro. Sangha Mitra’s email: Djhollen@ix.netcom.com
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