Are We in the West Getting "Real Buddhism"?
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- Опубліковано 6 вер 2024
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This better be the real deal! You got me starring at a fricken wall every day!
I know! Right? THAT'S what I said (not out loud) to my teachers.
@@HardcoreZenI hate how western culture is. How the west is trying to push there views on the east. But I think it's really a culture issue. I just can't stand the western culture and traditions. That stole stuff from the east like orientalism. Idk what is going on between the west and east. I just don't want to see Asia lose it's identity. It's just crazy how much misinformation about Buddhist beliefs, but I'm glad you are speaking about it.
I married into a Shingon family way before I got into zen. My understanding of it was this: go to the temple and buy taiyaki at festivals; ring a bell 108 times to mark the new year; thrown 5-yen coins in a hopper; and keep a pic of dead grandparents in the corner where you leave gifts of whiskey for a bit before drinking them.
That was pretty much my experience of how most Japanese people I know treat Buddhism.
And yet all of those things have serious spiritual meaning (well, apart from the taiyaki, hahah), they are not something superficial.
Good commentary.
Just want to add here, that Buddhism as a tradition with its roots in high esoteric hindu philosophy, from which it ofc departed during the self/god debates. The debates continued within buddhist schools though, and then much in the manner of something vs nothing, or personal salvation vs salvation for all. The philosophical debate of something vs nothing got pretty settled when Nagarjuna entered the scene though, and established the concept of Shunyata / emptiness and the Madhyamaka school. Which, if you read or listen to Jay Garfield or Keiji Nishitani actually share a lot with modern western philosophy, relating to western thought on nothingness.
You are too intelligent to be a western guy. In this comment section, so far I only identified you to have the actual knowledge of Buddha dharma with its historical roots and so on. Good job.
I heard a Buddhist scholar say that the Insight Meditation practiced in the west was originally championed by reformist monks in Burma and Thailand.
They weren’t practicing insight meditation at the time, and there were several attempts to recreate it.
Christianity actually did start out extremely diverse with wildly differing beliefs, and if allowed to continue probably would be even more diverse than Buddhism. But early on the Roman Catholic church heavily suppressed any expressions of Christianity they didn't agree with and burned a lot of books they didn't include into their definitive New Testiment. Christianity isn't the way it is because of a lack of creativity or time or because of some sort of common unity, but a ruthless self-destructive regime. You can learn more from Bart D. Ehrman's works, they're very interesting insights on the accurate historical origins of Christianity.
I'm not sure if it initially *started* out as diverse.
But I think it *became* diverse in the years preceding the heresiologists, who put a cap on any ideas outside of proto-orthodoxy.
I wouldn't call it a ruthless self-destructive regime, since the first council or councils were called upon by the roman emperor for obvious political advantages of having one holy catholic and apostolic church. But if you read the Church Fathers, you can see a lot of similarity between Buddhism and early Christianity, imo. In Asia, where I live, there is a lot of syncretism and Buddhism only allowed me to appreciate Christianity more. A nice quote by St Augustine: "In the end, there is only Christ loving Himself" and another by St Paul as well, "Christ is all and in all." Christ can just be another name for our True Self, which is very well affirmed in Catholic and Orthodox teachings. But yes, definitely Christianity has been quite violent at several points in history, so I understand how most converts from Christianity are iffy with it. But it is also a disingenuous to discount the entirety of the religion and its 2000 year history, seeing only the imperialism that enabled its violence.
Dharma is 1000 times more diverse than Christianity. Christianity is a religion and dharma is a way of life.
Nothing is ever the same as it was. The non-permanence of everything doesn’t exclude Buddhism.
Much like martial arts schools in the US that have a dozen or more belts before you reach Black, there are some drive-thru Buddhist/new age groups out there.
If you sit zazen properly, you're doing it. The rest is window dressing.
Does it matter whether the raft that you sail on is the original raft or not, as long as it gets you to where you want to go?
Most, the majority of Buddhism on the net or even at most temples around the US and the UK only express surface level teachings. There is a reason why you are only obtaining superficial Buddhism.
Those who seek more will find it. Those who are content with little will alter their minds and enter the stream slowly. The Buddha is patient. To overwhelm the student risks them becoming frustrated and abandoning the Dharma all together. So less is more..
You'll never find higher levels of attainment from books..
Unfortunately, a lot of what we seem to get in the west these days is politics with a thin Buddhist veneer. Things are constantly changing, but it's not always an improvement.
Yeah... that's a problem.
For me buddhism is a very simple thing:
Its the practice of a technique different from yoga thar emphasizes "seeing clearly" or insight on top of samadhi. To me the main advancement of the buddha was to realize this, that jhana is necessary but not sufficient to provide realization and understanding about the true nature and roots of reality.
Whats insight? Well zen people have a way of inducing it, theravadin people have another way, vajrayana another etc etc. Then you have the question of how you transfer the practice from the cushion to daily life and here again some sects have heavy ritualization in order to achieve this and behave nearly as a total institution, others rely on shock and confusion to help you "get it" so you never have time to adapt, etc. Then you have the questions what daily acts interfere with all the gains achieved in meditation and here we could quote the general code of conduct that underlies all major buddhist branches (with their differences) and lastly you have dhamma transmission or basically a tutoring from people further down the path so people less advanced can get help with the FAQ. All buddhisms that respect this, for me are legitimate forms of buddhism. What ill say is: i dont agree calling buddhist a practice that doesnt emphasize meditation practice as the cornerstone and above all else as this was the major advancement provided by buddha imho.
My wife's family are Jodo shinshu, and generally it seems to consist of chanting, occasional visits from the local priest and haka-maeri (grave visit/cleaning) at Obon. It seems fairly straightforward with not much to talk about. When I sat with a Rinzai group in Wakayama they just sat, did the minimum of ritual, and didn't philosophise or moralise much. Personally I like it like that, and though I like to read and study a lot of the key zen teachers.
I like the simple, low key approach that the Japanese take, it was a relief rather than a shock if I'm honest since I didn't want to just repackage Christianity.
To me Buddhism is a bit like Linux: got to have the prescribed "core" be it the Four Noble Truths, Eight Fold Path, etc or for Linux the Linux kernel and you can add on what works for you so long as it doesn't violate those prescribed "core" values."
Zen is like Arch, Pureland is like Ubuntu and Vajrayāna is like Hot Dog Linux. All still Buddhism and Linux yet all very different. By the way what distro would've the Buddha used? Debian of course but Ananda would've had to install and update it. =) Buddhism and Linux work because they can adapt to needs of its members and users without compromising its core values.
Years ago Dalai Lama said that Tibetian Buddhism was not for the US and that we would have to create our own. Personally I like the variations. I've belonged to a lay sangha loosely based on Zen in the US, a Vietnamese Pureland sangha both in the US and in Tp. Đà Nẵng, Việt Nam where I lived for a couple of years and Plum Village tradition sanghas in both the US and Đà Nẵng which were very different. I've also partaken in a couple of month-long retreats at Theravada monasteries in Thailand. Lastly a few month-long retreats at Plum Village Thailand and week-long retreats Blue Cliff in Pine Bush, NY. Variation is refreshing and a reminder that we are all unique beings with differing cultures.
In the end whose's to say which Buddhism is the "true" Buddhism?
I'm not sure... Many people in the West don't understand that Buddhism in non-theistic, not atheistic - there is a big difference between the two. We now have all these atheists and materialists who impose their own modernistic worldview on Buddhism, which is an ancient spiritual tradition with metaphysics. As if those people would be ashamed to say they follow a religion or as if there's something inherently wrong in religion (and as if the word automatically means Abrahamic religion...). Some of them can be even quite militant and make fun of all these Asian Buddhist cultures. Prof. Harry Oldmeadow has written a book called "Timeless Truths and Modern Delusions: The Perennial Philosophy as a guide for contemporary Buddhists" - I still haven't read it, I just ordered it, but it seem to be concerned with exactly this issue.
I've been practicing simultaneously various forms of Buddhism as a lay person in Japan for almost five years - Rinzai Zen, Soto Zen, Shingon and recently Shugendou. And I have to say, it's now very difficult for me to hold a conversation with "Buddhist" atheists, rationalists, materialists and leftist, neoliberal political activists from the West... I myself have much more to learn, of course.
I think of it like this: humans are community builders, so when we come across something like religion we tend to use it as a structure to build a community around. So a lot of the time the people you tend to meet in religious circles are there for the community more than the religion and will have their own community rituals they participate in. I used to meet a lot of these people in country churches; tea and bikkies with Jan, intense philosophical conversations with the minister.
There's ultimately nothing wrong with this, it's just how people work. Those of us who came to Buddhism via searching rather than being born into a buddhist community experience a kind of selection bias where the material we come into contact with is directed at seekers. I like the rituals too though; hold an incense stick and wave it around, put flowers on a shrine, say some mantras and use a mala. That stuff is very nice.
I just need to accept that as a westerner, I'm not going to "get" a lot of the traditions because they tend to have been made by and for people who were born into communities that I was not and that's really fine.
Buddhism (like its practioners) take the shape of the room that it inhabits
This is an aspect of the quality of tathata
Yesterday(ok 3 weeks ago, I watched it yesterday) XTC, today Teenage Fan Club, Cramps a while back, great musical taste Mr.Warner.......oops forgot Dimentia 13....(hahaha). Love the musical intro's, can you tell? 😜👍😆
Thank you!
Hey Brad, Im a huge fan and I've listened to all the audio books you have on Audible. I've been attempting to practice Zen Buddhism for a few years now and constantly find myself jumping in and out of the practice due to *place your excuse here* and constantly felt like doing research and finding information on the topic outside of your books and videos has been pretty sparce. Was wondering if you would start a series diving into the history of Dogen/Zen Buddhism and fully explaining concepts as a formal introduction for us UA-cam folk and the young generation.
It's a good idea. My problem with making a series of any kind is that in the past whenever I've made a series of videos, the viewership goes down drastically with each episode! It's weird and I don't know why.
@@HardcoreZen dogen is box office poison
Would it be possible to post the audio of your videos on podcast platforms?
It's possible. It's just more work and I'm lazy!
Have you even read Dogen on the Lotus Sutra? Lol. Dogen & Zen are NOT "rational". Just because you choose to ignore Dogen when he delves into the "mystical" doesn't mean mystical doesn't exist in Zen.
For what it's worth: The blogger David Chapman, whom I discovered you through, thinks Buddhism should more be thought of as a family of religions rather than one religion. He is an adherent of the Nyingma branch of Tibetan Buddhism and frankly finds his own religious practice, Thai Forest Tradition Theravada and Soka Gakkai as different from each other as Judaism, Christianity and Islam are. The latter three share the Old Testament, but would deny they are different branches of the same religion.
I have a book on my shelf somewhere called "Buddhist Religions." The reason the title contains a plural is because the author believes the same thing; that Buddhism shouldn't be thought of as a single religion, but as an umbrella term for a group of related religions.
It's a while ago I last read Chapman's blog Vividness in any depth, but I remember him specifically criticising the mainstream of Western Buddhism for trying too hard to paper over the differences in both beliefs and practices between the various Buddhist sects, which emerged in very different cultural and social contexts. Which in practice ends up excluding the tradition he follows, as it incorporates so many elements of pre-Buddhist Tibetan shamanism.
@@HardcoreZen
Back in the 1990s all I could find was Tibetan Buddhism and could not for the life of me understand it. Years later finally I come across Theravada and suddenly its all clear. Its the culture of Tibet bound up in the practice and then add Western idealism and God and you have one hot mess. Same goes for Zen. The problem is Americans' nucleus is Capitalism so unless one 'gets' something, Buddhism doesn't make sense. So I went to the Thai Forest Tradition, yes Thai culture is a part of it - if you are in Thailand, however the culture doesn't affect the teachings if you are not in Thailand.
Hey Brad enjoyed the video. Question for you: have you ever heard that Dogen switched to Pureland before his passing or was this inaccurate? If it’s true I find it quite interesting he shifted from zen.
I have never heard any indication that he made such a switch. Kosho Uchiyama apparently switched from doing zazen to chanting nembutsu (what Pureland Buddhists do) when he was very old and having trouble with his legs. Maybe that’s who you’re thinking of?
I appreciate the reply and you would know far more than myself so there is a chance I was mistaken on who it was. 😊 thank you for your videos and books!
@fredherzogfan its absolutely certain dogen never switched to pureland, its probably a rumour put around by pureland buddhists as zen and pureland were compeditors
Like your style 👍
Clear as a mountain lake 📿
Lord Buddha did leave a few clues,it is up to each person to interprete what he tought and test it out as he recommended.There is no self as such only an ego and persona which changes through life.
I would assume that no we dont. I had a sensi who knew a lot, has been practicing a lot (40+ years) yet I just really could not ever get into it because of the Americanisms and attitudes, Ill go again later to try a new Zendo, but for now my interests are gone for Zen.
Are We in the West Getting "Real Buddhism"? No, because Brad Warner. 🤣
Love that live singing. I read all kinds of religious texts over the years and came to my own beliefs pretty organically. That's the only way to do it I think.
if you consider Buddhism asba religion then you never learnt a thing about Buddhism.
And what has this to do with my own beliefs?@@phoenixj1299
Buddhism is definitely a religion
@@WriterMikeMonson Wrong. First of all it's not Buddhism. It's Dharma/Buddha dharma. "Buddhism" is a dharma and not a religion. It doesn't have a dogma, it doesn't encourage belief. It doesn't encourage blind belief of one books, it doesn't talk about blasphemy and so on.
@@phoenixj1299 It has temples and priests, and priests do weddings and funerals at the temples. It's a religion.
I just practice insight (from Argentina). Regards.
this is the topic of the koan “why did brad warner go to japan?”
To take a job as an assistant English teacher.
@@HardcoreZen classic wrong answer! thanks for trying though.
@@jefffedorkiw1619 LOL
How about those forest hermit Theravadans tho huh? Yeesh. I sure hope those guys aren't the ones who have it right.
Ziggy is so adorable ❤
He is!
have you heard of i**aeli zen master and meditation teacher, nissim amon? wow, just wow, i'm speechless. i'd be interested how you relate to such phenomena..
I know who he is. I don't follow his stuff at all. Last I saw he was doing a Buddhist video game of some sort, I think.
@@HardcoreZen i just learned about him yesterday, seeing his guided meditation or i guess instruction for i**aeli soldiers about how to kill without compassion and how to integrate it so you can continue stably and have a good night's sleep. it's truly fascinating. i guessed that you don't follow him. i am not surprised by the concept, and i have the luxury of not being in a relationship with such people, but still, when i actually see such behaviour, it's still astonishing and fascinating in a disturbing sense. guess i'll just sit with it.
@@real_pattern I saw the video. I'm reluctant to say anything because I don't know if the translation from Hebrew is correct. The video *looks* weird, though. Even if the translation is wrong.
SONG REQUEST FOR BRAD: Disco Duck
Oh God! I remember that one! One I'd like to do from that same era is Kung Fu Fighting.
Ha! @@HardcoreZen I used to have that one on a K Tel album.
Buddhism is not a monolith. Especially if you are coming off shrooms and Terence McKenna (I love him), you'll find Buddhist temples in Asia tame by comparison. I have been to Thailand and visited many temples as a tourist. I had a tourist experience, not a spiritual experience. What else would it be? I was there for a week. Even if I had spoken to monks, it would've been a tourist conversation.
I often find myself reflecting the different attitudes between buddhists, consciousness explorists, OOB experiencers, shamanists, christian mystics etc. I have tried some of these paths and did experience different and hard to consolidate experiences which seem genuine and true to me also. I did always strive to find an understanding that is capable to bridge these different pathways into one simple and truthful path that contains all these, but I don't see how this could be accomplished or is to be found somewhere. As soon as someone tries to do that, it becomes a concept and something debatable and not the truth. I think Zen and other paths point into that direction, but they also often break with their own wisdom. That's the paradox of human existence.
Nothing is fixed.
You got any more retreats coming up?
I’m supposed to lead a sesshin at Hokyoji in Minnesota in February. I’m not sure if that’s open to the public. It is very rural.
@@HardcoreZen February is a rough time to visit Minnesota.
It is a good question. Theravada Abhidhamma Pitaka contains the core teachings in Buddhism. Thank you.
Can't say I agree that Gnosticism can claim as much a place as "Original Christianity". I think it's highly unlikely that the historical Jesus would teach ideas like that.
Well… it’s very very old. It’s certainly older than most forms of Christianity that are now considered orthodox.
Bradism
As far as historical records shows buddhism was a shramana (ascetic) tradition which had more to do with monkhood and involved lots of rules and regulations on how to live in that setting. But after death of buddha itself its followers started changing it so no one is following real buddhism. Buddhism is simple,go into regions away from human settlements for calm surroundings and start enquiry of your mind and avoid any temptation like intoxicants money and women. But these simple things are hardest to do that's why buddhism declined so rapidly.
Some people believe that.
Good. Others should read your comment for more knowledge. Yes Buddhism is a shramana branch of dharma. It's also a nastik school of thought of dharma/Sanatana Dharma.
It's a question of form versus substance. Buddhism changed its form, but it didn't change its substance (content), at least not much. In fact, it gradually got enriched by the authentic spiritual experience of many other masters after Shakyamuni Buddha entered parinirvana, for which we should be grateful.
Whats going on in Buddhism right now is similar to what happened during the protestant reformation in the 1500s. The Catholic Church knew very well that its doctrine had strayed far from the authentic teachings of Christianity...but it counted on a ignorant public not being able to read Latin. Suddenly, Martin Luther appeared and translated the Bible into German so the common people could read it for themselves.
In Dogen's time it was widely believed in China and Japan that the Avatamsaka Sutra was the first thing dictated by the founder of Buddhism. Now, with modern scholarship we know this is impossible and ridiculous...not a single professor of Buddhism at college level believes this. Its the quick and easy access to translations of original authentic scriptures that is revealing the layers of distortion built up in Buddhism over a long period of time.
John R. McRae is a Professor of East Asian Buddhism and the author of 'Seeing Through Zen' an excellent example of how Zen is being exposed as a complex fabrication which has no basis in Mahayana Sutras...and even less with authentic Pali texts. There is a PDF version out there...an eye-opening read.
Rinpoche is a reincarnated master.
Oh! Thank you! But, then again, wouldn't ALL masters by definition be reincarnated masters? At least if you believe in reincarnation.
@@HardcoreZen The key difference is that a Rinpoche is a recognized master. So you can link their current life with their past one. That's why when an important Tibetan master dies, a few months/years later they start looking for the child in which this master has reincarnated. Quite horrific, because the child is separated from his family.
@HardcoreZen 😆 Technically, yes. But what the Tibetans mean by that is a well known teacher who was found at birth or soon after and known to be that specific teacher from the life before.
WHAT DID BUDDA TEACH--- not tibetean buddism whch is hinduism etc.