The Buddha says it's okay to eat potato chips

In the sutras, the Buddha very clearly says to venerable Ananda: "Ananda, if there is no body, there is no dharma. If there is no food, there is no dharma. If there are no clothes, there is no dharma. Take care of your body, for the sake of the dharma."

So here's a little food dharma to help with that. Now in midsummer swelter is the time to gorge on oily, salty food. Yes potato chips. Right now they're good for you.  So are all those "olive oil dishes"--that's actually the translation of their category--from the Mediterranean: French ratatouille, Italian pesto, Greek plakis, Turkish imam bayaldi, Syrian tabouli and all those Armenian vegetables braised in olive oil. Right now when you are sweating in the heat, your body needs a lube job. Enter oil. It lubes the muscles and tissues so nothing tears while you're out having fun. 

And since you're sweating out the moisture the rest of your body needs, you need salt and lots of it to stem the flow. Yes potato chips. But yes, olives and feta cheese, anchovies and capers, even salt cod and miso.

Now is the moment Mother Nature hands out watery food: tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, berries. She knows your body needs the juice. Watermelon agua fresca anyone?

One more thing: chilies.  Now is the time. Hot and hotter inside and out. The reason super spicy dishes are so prevalent in hot climates is that chilies make the body sweat and sweating is nothing more than your body dehumidifying. A fancy air conditioner is nothing more than a dehumidifier so in essence chili peppers are cheap Frigidaires. 

The other sneaky thing about hot chilies: they make you want to put out the fire and boy does the body need water right now.

So there's dharma of the body for you, wisdom at least as old and proven as the Buddha's.


~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy Garson All rights Reserved

A better samsara

 "A better samsara."  Those words jumped out of Ringu Tulku's book, Confusion Arises as Wisdom, my second time around and haunted me long after I passed that page. A better samsara...a better samsara... The phrase brought back a puzzling phrase of my own beloved guru Thrangu Rinpoche: "the happiness of samsara." Apparently I've missed it: there's still some good stuff here where we're all stuck. We don't have to try so hard to get out so fast. 

That's very comforting. The whole idea that there is a better, happier samsara makes it easier to get up in the morning to face a world that's been bitten by money and rabidly mad. It definitely helps confusion and feels like wisdom.  So I want to share what Ringu Tulku told me on pages 36 and 37. Please share too.

First of all, you need to know as I didn't, there are two distinct sorts of Dharma practice, and--here's what I didn't know-- both are okay according to the great master, Je Gampopa, whose text Ringu Tulku is teaching. The first is "worldly dharma." Many of us think we have to disparage this. We practice this, as Ringu Tulku says, "to get something better in this life or future lives. For instance, we want peace of mind, we want things to work out well, and we want to be happy."

And then he says:  "It's good to apply the teaching to our states of mind and emotional problems in order to have a better life."   Not just Ringu Tulku and Je Gampopa, but even the great Indian scholar Nagarjuna advocates worldly dharma practice. "Ascending the stairs of the gods' and humans' dharma will bring one close to liberation." He actually suggests we all begin with worldly dharma practice to become better human beings, what Ringu Tulku calls "good solid citizens of samsara." The Buddha's teachings and all the sutras and tantras agree on this psychological point:  the first step to liberation is to become a decent, stable human being. 

And here's why I find that so valuable to know. Mostly we just hear about the esoteric, exotic or excruciating practices great masters do to achieve enlightenment, how they all so roundly rejected samsara. "This can lead students to think that having complete renunciation," Ringu Tulku says, "is the only way to practice, and unless they are like Milarepa, they are not dharma practitioners. This isn't true. Worldly dharma practice comes first. We can apply the dharma in daily life to take responsibility, do the right thing, go to work, make money, and look after our family. It's good to create a nice life and a nice community, to do things for others, avoid extremes and include a little meditation to bring peace of mind."

The law of karma is that positive actions bring positive results. "So," Ringu Tulku concludes, "worldly dharma practice means doing dharma activities to in order to have a better world, a better samsara. As long as you're here, why not live in a better samsara than a worse one?"
  
Yes. Why not? Anyone have a problem with that?


~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy Garson All rights Reserved

Buddhism: Monks, Lamas, Rinpoches, Nun of the Above

Although I really wanted to go this year, I didn't get to the July 4th fireworks. I saturated myself with bug spray, grabbed a sweater and was leaving the house when my phone rang. Recognizing the number, I took the call. I didn't think I'd be holding the receiver to my ear for the next 75 minutes.

I missed the fireworks to listen to someone fired up about a missed life opportunity. A Swiss woman who's spent the last 24 years as a very active, devout Tibetan Buddhist wants only to be fully ordained as a nun and for all sorts of nonsensical reasons can't be. Since she closed her pricey couture shop in Zurich, shaved off her hair and took basic ordination vows in the Kagyu lineage (that I share), she's done more than enough long retreats to be a lama, worked as attaché and translator for the tireless English speaking Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo of Cave in the Snow fame, attended countless teachings and expended endless energy trying to get the full ordination the way any monk can. She had just returned the night before from an all-Buddhist nuns conference in Indonesia and was outraged all over again. More runaround, more fences to block this sort of immigration. 

"You know," she said with great exasperation, "while we were there in Indonesia, we heard the local sultan who has four daughters and no sons had just announced he would not let the title pass to his nephew when he died but to his oldest daughter. He said it was time for change. Imagine: a Muslim sultan can acknowledge women but a Rinpoche won't."

All Tibetan Buddhist nuns are categorically and systematically denied the final blessing of full ordination no matter how far beyond a monk their level of practice and achievement extends. The great icons of compassion for all beings give lip service about making these nuns equal to Tibetan Buddhist monks, but the luck stops there. The Dalai Lama is not against the idea; he just isn't the right person to ordain them and doesn't know who to ask. He says it will happen one day...soon.  His Holiness Karmapa has started to focus on women, saying he wants to repay his mother left behind in Tibet beyond his purview, by helping all women. He's set up a training program for would-be nuns, but it doesn't include final full ordination. "Maybe soon,"  he promises. My friend said that "soon" will only be for Tibetan Buddhist nuns who are Tibetan, not Western. Emphasis on Tibetan, not Buddhist. Read that wisdom, compassion, racism.

My friend is particularly incensed at not having a decent name. The Tibetan word for a nun is "Ani" and with a note of respect added becomes Ani-la. That's the term I've always used. But apparently it simply means "auntie."  "Can you imagine," my friend snapped, "I've spent 24 years in retreat, service and study to be called auntie! Just to show them how degrading that is, I've started calling monks uncle. Boy they do not like that!!!" 

So now at least the powers that be are telling laypeople and monks to call Western nuns "tsunma", Tibetan for venerable female.That's about as far as change goes.  Nobody dares to be the first to do something that has never been done before. Tibetan Buddhism is so hide-bound, even my own beloved teacher is guilty of discrimination. With great foresight and compassion, he chartered what's become a thriving nunnery with its own separate three-year retreat center (graduation from that makes a male a lama) and shedra or five-year intensive study program. Five years ago, Rinpoche even let the nuns sit for the entrance exam to the great Buddhist university in the holy city of Varanasi where a specific number of admission slots is allotted to each branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The women earned more than 50% of ours. Nine nuns were sent for medical training and are now amchis, Tibetan doctors. But not one of Rinpoche's nuns has ever been fully ordained as a bonafide monastic in the Buddha's sangha. 

Western nuns have become the untouchable caste of Tibetan Buddhism. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo has had to turn away many who wanted to become nuns because Western women who want to devote themselves to Dharma as nuns can't even think about doing that without a fat bank account to pay for their food, lodging, studies and future of no income. If they do dedicate themselves and their money as my friend has done, they get to spend their lives and funds in limbo and oblivion, shunting about for sanctuary, never acknowledged, accepted or advanced. As though they'd pollute the pureland. 


The situation is not this dire in non-Tibetan Buddhism. Jetsunma and the even more famous Pema Chodron got their full and final ordination outside their Tibetan lineage, seeking out Chinese Mahayana and southeast Asian Theravada masters--on the advice of their Tibetan gurus no less. Tibetan rinpoches remind Western nuns they still have those options. My friend, who is getting on in years and thus has reason to be impatient, will go to Taiwan for the two-month full ordination program the next time it is offered. "What else can I do?" she said. "Rinpoche told me to go to China, but I don't want to be ordained by some mainland Chinese. It's sad enough you can't take your vows with the Rinpoche you've been devoted to the way a monk can. This is not the Buddha's teaching!"


She is right. This is not the Buddha's teaching. Dharma, with deliberate emphasis on the unity and equality of ALL sentient beings, was supposed to be the antidote to the poisonous caste system. With prompting from the loyal Ananda, the Buddha stopped discriminating, embraced the devotion of his step-mother and ordained her as the first Buddhist nun. Other women then entered his sangha the same way. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo-- an iconoclast of infinite determination--has managed to find an image of the first Buddhist nun and enshrined it at her own new and growing nunnery outside Dharamsala, India. My friend wants to make thousands of photo copies to pass out at the huge annual Tibetan prayer services, the monlams, now convened annually around the globe. The next one is Vancouver BC end of August, presided over by our beloved teacher. "I am going to put this in their faces. I am going to show Rinpoche and ask him why he is waiting, why he is not following the Buddha's example."

It's cultural, more Tibetan than Buddhist. The great voices of virtue that sometimes swallow meat can't swallow equality for women...ostensibly because they believe their job is to pass tradition on exactly as they received it--pure and unpolluted by changing worldly concerns. Since there were never any Western women in Tibet begging to be nuns, they can disregard and discount them now. The way none of us can smell our own bad breath if we have it, these men don't smell their own hypocrisy. Equality for female monastics, like meat eating, is the huge blind spot in the vehicles on the Bodhisattva path and it's causing life-threatening collisions. 

The saddest part is that these so-called great cavaliers of compassion and wisdom, the Karmapas, were knowingly empowered and launched by women, the dakinis to whom they owe their power. In fact the entire Tibetan Dharma and its sibling the Mahayana that is the foundation of His Holiness the Dalai Lama rests on the prowess of the great Prajnaparamita: wisdom --always and ever portrayed as the great goddess. One stream of the Kagyu lineage to which my friend and I belong was launched by the accomplished Sukhasiddhi. Guru Rinpoche needed Yeshe Tsogyal to advance and protect his teachings. The powerful and precious Tibetan Buddhist practices of Chod, Red Chenrezig and Tara were all created and bestowed by women. And it is not for nothing that the entire Kagyu lineage wakes up every morning and starts the day with prayers to Mother Tara. 

Women have innate power that men must struggle to attain. So shots are still being fired in the battle of the sexes, an unending civil war, even in places that proclaim peace and by men who proclaim compassion for all sentient beings. They are as stuck in samsara as the rest of us.















~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy Garson All rights Reserved