On Virtue

There is a saying about virtue:
She nestles in rough untroden rocks
And reigns a divine, sacred land.
Not all mortals can see her.
Only those,
whose burning desire in their heart
leads them to the greatest deeds

-Simonides of Ceos

Happy Vesak

Wishing everyone a Happy Vesak.

May all beings benefit from the teachings of the one who was born on this day, so many years ago.

Namo Triratna!

God Talk

NY Times columnist Stanley Fish presents a fascinating discussion of Terry Eagleton's new book, 'Reason, Faith, and Revolution'. The work discusses the recent clashes between science and religion and is quite critical of 'school-yard atheists' like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The piece delves into some very thought provoking ideas:

...And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often when making the same point: “[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” Running for a bus is a focused empirical act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The positions one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something else, and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement. Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet (and Chekhov); it’s after something else...

Buddha in Glory

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed and growing sweet -
all this universe, to the furthest stars
and beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.

-Rainer Maria Rilke in "Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Prose and Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke", translated and edited by Stephen Mitchell

A True Four-Fold Sangha

The Buddhist Channel recently had an interview with Ajahn Brahm, the well-known monk who currently resides in Australia. The interview, titled 'The Bhikkuni Question' deals with the attempts, hindrances, and future of reviving (or in some cases introducing) the Theravada Bhikkuni lineage. Here's an exerpt:

Is it true that since the Theravada bhikkhuni sangha 'died out' many centuries ago, it has been impossible to ordain new bhikkhunis correctly according to Vinaya? And are Thai bhikkhunis who have been ordained since the Theravada bhikkhuni sangha, which was restored in Sri Lanka [in the late 1990s with Mahayana bhikkhunis as preceptors], not legitimate Theravada bhikkhunis?

That is a myth. In Thailand, we sometimes spend too much of our time believing our teachers, believing accepted wisdom rather than investigating and challenging. I thought, too, when I was a young monk in Thailand that the bhikkhuni order couldn't be legally revived. But having investigated and studied, I've found there is no problem at all. Someone like Bhikkhu Bodhi [a respected Theravada scholar-monk] has researched the Pali Vinaya and his paper is one of the most eloquent I've seen - fair, balanced, comes out on the side of 'It's possible, why don't we do this?' I've helped to publish the Thai translation of Bhikkhu Bodhi's paper, which will be distributed to monks and other interested people in Thailand.

One of the biggest myths is that bhikkhunis in the Mahayana tradition are somehow separated from the Theravada. But the truth of the matter is, there is no such thing as a Mahayana Vinaya. In all the Mahayana schools, they follow mostly a Dharmagupta Vinaya. Dharmagupta is one of the Theravada sects. They follow Theravada Vinaya. So the bhikkhunis we see even now in Taiwan and China is a lineage that is unbroken since the time of the Buddha.

In addition, there is another way of reading the Vinaya to say that the Buddha left an opportunity open for just the bhikkhus to ordain bhikkhunis and revive the bhikkhuni sangha.

Given this possibility in the Vinaya, we can argue that point as scholars, but also out of compassion. You have to follow the rules, but if there is a possible interpretation, which is the kind one, that's the one we should follow because that's what the Buddha would have encouraged us to do.

It was very easy before to say it can't be done. Now the argument is not whether it can or can't be done, but why it should or shouldn't be done.