October 28, 2003

refuge and empty teachers

I’ve waited for nearly two years. I asked lamas and they maybe didn’t think I was ready or something. But on Sunday (10/26/03), I took formal refuge. It was a nice ceremony in San Francisco at Tse Chen Ling with Geshe Ngawang Drakpa. My Dharma name is now Ngawang Tashi. [When you take refuge you get your teacher’s name and an additional name — sorta like how we do it in the United States with surnames.]

Later that day and yesterday I felt pretty down. Bad headache, stomach ache, etc. I think I was burning up all that bad karma or something. Plus I’ve had a lot on my mind...

One day over lunch I was sitting with a coworker and we got to talking about Geshe Michael Roach. He asked how I felt about some recent news (of which I knew nothing about). If you are a student of Geshe-la’s then maybe you should spend some time reading his open letter that was sent to the lamas, then read the Worldview response, then read the lama’s responses. It will be better if you do it in this order and find out things in that order. [They are in Adobe PDF format, by the way.] If you already know about this or you aren’t a student of Geshe Michael’s then maybe you won’t want to spend all that time, but the following poem will probably not mean much for you.

So, this coworker asked, but I didn’t know anything about it. I sought out these answers on my own and then composed this “poem”:

Everything of value I learned from him.
He taught of keeping your morality,
To free you from getting old, sickness, death, and having to be reborn.
By keeping these vows you can come to understand reality.
Nothing works the way we think it does,
Everything works because of your kindness to others.
He brought the books of a culture nearly lost into full view for all,
Translating them in a beautiful way,
Preserving them in many ways.
Taught me to learn this language,
Though, through no fault of his, it’s taken me a long time to learn.
Taught me to meditate on important things,
Though, through no fault of his, it’s taken me a long time to learn.
Taught me to give service to the great, holy lamas.
Now I work for one of the great Dharma centers of holy Lama Zopa Rinpoche.
Though, through no fault of his, it’s taken me a long time to get here.
When I heard about his trainings at the great retreat,
I must admit I was a little shocked.
I must say that I was a little hurt.
I felt a bit of sadness.
Then I didn’t know what to feel.
I quickly jumped to his defense:
Look at the tankhas and the union of the two.
It’s not for you or I, but who’s to say it’s not for him.
I thought and struggled with it more.
Finally, just recently, I found his open letter to the holy lamas.
I read it carefully, I understood it’s meaning.
If it’s true, and I cannot know for sure,
What I have learned has been from a great holy guru.
A spiritual guide of the highest form.
Since I cannot know the answer,
As I am just an ordinary being,
I will take the guru’s word as such.
And as a thinking, analytical, questioning person,
I will likely keep searching for answers,
Searching for truth and searching for true realizations.

posted @ 9:56 PM

October 19, 2003

zen tibetan

[or Zen and the Art of Being Tibetan Buddhist]

Vajrapani is hosting a Zen group from the Bay Area this weekend. It is amazing the differences between the Japanese/Zen groups and the Tibetan/Mahayana tradition. A comment was made the other day about how simple their altar setup and everything seemed to be. “I’d like to have Zen aesthetics with Tibetan philosophy,” she said. “Exactly!” I said. I’ve thought this for years. The imagery and color in the Tibetan tradition is nice and it certainly has it’s place, but when you are just trying to meditate it seems like it can be a little distracting. Fortunately for both of us, one of the senior nuns, Ven. Ingrid [she is the nun sitting directly above Lama Osel in this picture], was in the room. She has been to His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s residence and has seen his meditation room. She said that it is very “Zen-like” in that he only has one painting (tankha) on the wall of the deity he is meditating upon. Not hundreds of water bowls, hundreds of tankha’s, hundreds of Buddha statues. That is in other parts of the house maybe, but not in the meditation room.

I just thought I would share that because I’ve had this belief that sometimes our tradition get very caught up in all of the imagery and we forget about the reasons we practice. We’re trying to end our suffering and attachment — not increase it by switching our desire from images of say beautiful women in some magazine to beautiful paintings of Buddhas.

posted @ 8:58 AM

October 8, 2003

energy crisis

Vajrapani is run on solar power. It is also a Tibetan Buddhist center. Both of these statements have the implication that computer usage is not highly rated. First of all, running a computer — regular old desktop with normal old monitor — sucks a good amount of juice. Those connected to “the grid” who go outside and look at their power meter right now (with nothing much else on in the house) will say, “but the little wheel is barely turning!” This is true and I used to think, “if the little wheel doesn’t turn to fast we must not be using much electricity.” When you are producing your own power a little usage can seem like a lot.

As for the second statement, the resistance to computers is unbelievable. Maybe it’s got nothing to do with being Tibetan Buddhist and more to do with statement number one and the fact that when you connect to the internet you can only get online at 28k. Regardless of your modem, everyone at Vajrapani can only connect at 28k. Doesn’t make the internet seem all the cool or useful and if it takes you 10 minutes to check email and your computer uses 400 watts of power — you tend to not like computers much.

I’m starting to be converted. I went from working in a building with 700 computers all connected to the internet at a T1 connection. At home I had the computer on all day — regardless if I was even there or not — and constantly connected to the DSL connection. Computers were highly efficient and most of the people I knew relied on them exclusively for tasks like finding a phone number, movie times, or ‘chatting’ with a friend. I’m now surrounded by rolodexes, newspapers and telephones. Vajrapani people claim their [old way] of doing things is faster. Here, they are correct. In most parts of our country they are incorrect.

My step-mom asked me to find out how much of an iMac $400 would buy you on eBay and wanted to know my computer “wish list”. I realized that in the last month, I no longer have a wish list like that. Used to be I’d see an ad for an 80 gig hard drive, 512 MB RAM, G5 processor and I’d just drool. Now I think, “man, that’s expensive and it sucks a lot of juice and fast doesn’t really matter much if you’re only connecting at 28k and if it’s not a laptop I’m not interested. Laptops use considerably less amounts of energy (as do flat screen monitors). I’ve wanted a laptop for years now, but it’s becoming a high priority here, but a G5 is low priority.

You might be thinking to yourself, “your post shows a time of around 7 o’clock in the morning. You’re in California and I know the sun isn’t up at that time. What are you doing on the computer writing out such a long dissertation about computer/energy usage all the while using up valuable resources?!? Are you on crazy pills?!?” The answer is, “no, I’m not crazy.” The fifteen year old batteries that we use to store energy decided that they could no longer store any more energy. So we are now running the generator (diesel powered) 24 hours a day / 7 days a week. It produces more electricity than we can use so, as one person joked, “now is the time to string up the Christmas lights”. For the next few days we can have the computer, TV and stereo all going at the same time and it won’t be too big of a deal. I’m taking this time to let you know that I probably won’t be making regular posts to this site. I’ll post when I can and maybe someday get a laptop so that I can post more. I’d still love to hear your comments, although I probably won’t respond nearly as much as I used to.

posted @ 6:59 AM