Song of Chandrakirti

There are two ways of seeing everything,
A perfect way and a false way.
So each and every thing that can ever be found
Holds two natures within.

And what does perfect seeing see?
It sees the suchness of all things.
And false seeing sees what appears, no more.
This is what the perfect Buddha said.

We learned this song at a retreat I attended over the weekend. If I were to take a stab at interpreting this, I would say that concepts are not true reality, and that there is a nonconceptual way of seeing things that one achieves after meditating and practicing which is nonconceptual. This is but the tip of the iceberg of what could be said about the song, though.

An idea

Most prose takes a high level description of mental events. This character got out of bed, talked with some other character, went to the park, etc, etc. But if you look closely at experience, it is actually filled with much more mental chatter, much of it verbalizable, although much of it is not. Driving down the road, that tree looks interesting, I'm hungry, where should I eat, my toe itches, Glenn Beck sure is a nutcase, etc. (This is a poor imitation, but hopefully signals the kind of thing I mean.) It's interesting because most of this mental chatter is completely forgotten, and our own memory of events conforms to the type of high-level abstract narrative that tends to characterize prose. Moreover, this type of high level description tends to conform to the idea of independent objective experience. Two people in similar situations would tend to agree to a large extent on the high level narrative. In any event, I had the idea that it would be fun to try to write a prose piece in such a way as to emulate the more detailed stream of consciousness. Actually James Joyce did this a bit in Ulysses, now that I think about it, but the more I thought about it, the less I was able to conceive of how to do it. Normally, I can only capture the moment-by-moment stream if I let myself go and just observe it, but the moment I try to analyze and remember it, the process is contaminated by the fixation on remembering it. The thoughts turn away from their natural progression and turn toward an analysis of the progression. Hmm.

A suspicion

I wonder whether following the money funneling into these town hall disruptors would ultimately lead to the insurance companies?

Another useless war

Why are we in Afghanistan?

Different Buddhist Schools of Thought

Here is an excerpt of a piece I am writing describing the Buddhist view of perception.

According to the Svatanrika school of Tibetan Buddhism, the self does not exist inherently. When you look for the self, especially when the mind is focused in meditation, you will find that every hypothesis turns out to be off the mark. I recall meditating on the mind one time, where the exercise was to identify the shape of the mind, identify its color, etc, and coming to the startled conclusion that "The mind appears to have no qualities." The closer you, look the less substantial it seems. This is not to deny that people exist, but that they have no unchanging eternal aspect (something akin to a soul.) People change from moment to moment and each aspect of their body and mind is interdependent with many other causes and conditions usually considered separate from the self. Now many people will agree that there is no permanent unchanging self, but yet in their day to day lives, still react emotionally as though they have one. In every experience, there always is a sense that there is a "me" experiencing it. When you hear a sound there is a sense that there is a sound and a person experiencing that sound, but actually both the sound and the experience occur simultaneously. The perceived and the perceiving are indivisible in our consciousness. So how does it make sense to say that there is a separate entity hearing that sound? It is quite common to intellectually agree that a certain concept is true, but to act without taking the fact to heart. For example, alcoholics can often see that alcohol will not bring them lasting happiness, but will actually lead to immense suffering, but they often cannot bring their actions into harmony with this intellectually held belief.

The Cittamatrin school of Tibetan Buddhism goes on to analyze the exterior world, coming to the conclusion that it and the things in it don't actually exist. The reasoning here is somewhat different. All objects are perceived through the mind. All experiences are mental experiences. Our minds cannot directly come in contact with a table for example. Indeed such a statement seems to be an absurd category error. So everything we experience is but a thought, a mental event. Hence it makes little sense to postulate that there is anything except the mind. Both internal and external phenomena are of one mental ``substance." At first this view seems solipsistic, that everything is but a massive hallucination, a delusion that we create. However, the refutation to this is that there is no self that could possibly have created all these mental events in the first place. The self is as much a product of mind as are seemingly external objects. The example given here is that of a dream. Life is like a dream according to this viewpoint in the sense that nothing is inherently real. Nothing has true physical solidity. That's not to say there is no difference between waking and dreaming life, but it does mean that they are of the same basic nature. I recall several lucid dreams that brought this point home to me. In one dream, I was floating through space when I realized that my true body was asleep in bed, and I couldn't fathom where it could be in the dreamscape. It seemed like it was in a totally different universe possibly way far beyond the horizon. It was a disorienting experience. In another dream I was walking down a very realistic street and the thought occurred to me that I might be dreaming. Yet as I gazed upon the scenery, it seemed so realistic that I came to the conclusion that I couldn't possibly be dreaming. After I woke up, I realized that I had been. Another time, I was walking down a street in my hometown, when I realized that the entrance to a building I was familiar with was very different than it had been. At that moment I realized I was dreaming, despite how real the scene was. These repeated dream experiences have driven home to me that the way the mind experiences waking life and the way it experiences dream life is truly of the same nature. After all, there is no fool-proof way to tell whether you are waking or dreaming, and as illustrated here, the mind can be frequently confused by this.

The Madyamika school of Tibetan Buddhism points to a problem they see with the Cittamatrin viewpoint, namely that the Cittamatrins seem to be saying that the mind has an inherent reality. The mind is like the ocean and thoughts are like waves on the ocean, or the mind is like a mirror and thoughts are reflections in the mirror. The Cittamatrins say that the ocean and the mirror really exist, whereas the Madyamikas argue that the mind can't really inherently exist either. It is totally beyond conceptuality. So they actually say that it doesn't exist. It doesn't not exist. It doesn't both exist and not exist. And it doesn't neither exist nor not exist.

Even beyond this is the Shentong school, but I'll save my commentary on that for another day.

Giving up Facebook for a month

The difference between my blogging endeavors here and my time on Facebook is similar to the difference between reading a book and watching the TV. One is a lot more mentally engaging than the other. Facebook saps my strength with little to show for it. Therefore I've decided to give it up for a month and see what happens. That means I might be more active on this blog. We'll see.

A favorite song of mine

Cripple Creek


A cripple on his deathbed and a daydream did ride,
Out past the streams of fire on a pedaled path did glide,
He left his wheelchair spinning deeper in the mud.
in it set his memories and his body and his blood.

An angel came to greet him by his side she flew,
whispered as a part of him what he already knew,
his head was spinning freely and it was plain to see,
his burden was himself, he bore, the sight his eyes could be.

His death, it died quite easily, right there was gone for good,
but he couldn't see his loved one, like he thought he should
he thought "if they were gone", said he, "and this cannot be true"
the search to find what wasn't there has brought him back to you.

-Alexander Spence

Dreaming on Dreaming

Last night I had a dream where I was sitting in a teaching by my Lama, my mom in the back, in a house by a lake. At some point, his translator said that Lama had some free time, so if there was anything anyone wanted him to do, now was the time. There was silence for a while and my mind started racing, trying to figure out what to do with this golden opportunity. Someone else asked something, sparking me to remember a question I had. I said to the translator "In dreams people are not real, whereas in real life people are real in some sense, although not real in another. What is the difference?" The translator said to me, "well you agree that real life is like a dream?" and I responded "Yes, that's what prompted me to ask this question. I mean in real life I don't have miraculous powers like in a dream, but..."(I felt a little bit like I was bragging here. Basically saying that I do have miraculous powers in dreams.) At this point in the dream someone started talking over me, and then I started talking over them, and then I found that I wasn't saying what I wanted to say and kind of wished I would shut up. Another character mentioned that sometimes two people can see the same detail in a dream, and the translator asked them how, and the other person said "Heroin!" I almost yelled "Not me!" At this point the Lama said "twenty minutes" indicating that some preestablished period of time had elapsed. He looked tired. After he left, I noticed my mom was gone from the back of the room. After this, I was standing out on the pier looking at the lake, feeling disappointed that my question wasn't definitively answered. I didn't realize I had been dreaming until I woke up.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on Buddhism?

One encouraging thing the Guide has to say about parallel universes is that you don't stand the remotest chance of understanding it. You can therefore say "What?" and "Eh?" and even go cross-eyed and start to blither if you like without any fear of making a fool of yourself.

The first thing to realize about parallel universes, the Guide says, is that they are not parallel.

It is also important to realize that they are not, strictly speaking, universes either, but it is best if you don't try to realize that until a little later, after you've realized that everything you've realized up to that moment is not true.

The reason they are not universes is that any given universe is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at what is technically known as the WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of General Mish Mash. The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash doesn't actually exist either, but is just the sum total of all the different ways of looking at it if it did.

The reason they are not parallel is the same reason that the sea is not parallel. It doesn't mean anything. You can slice the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and will generally come up with something that someone will call home.

Please feel free to blither now.


-Mostly Harmless, Douglas Adams

Lucid Dreaming

I had an interesting type of lucid dream last night, where at various points in the dream, I became aware that I was dreaming but was still caught up in the dream. In fact, what was rather fascinating was that I was walking down a sidewalk, thinking how much the progression of events so far seemed dream-like, but that this was definitely not a dream because the reality around me seemed so clear and real. Then something clicked. I'm not sure what clued me in, but as I gazed up at a gas station sign, I realized that I was, indeed, dreaming. Later in the dream, I remembered I was dreaming when I saw that another character's hand had healed way too much for one day, and I said to him something like "That's what happens in the dream world."

I've had lucid dream before, where as soon as I realize I'm dreaming, I begin to take authorship of the dream in a much more direct way. I feel in those dreams, like I'm consciously causing things to happen, whereas in the dream last night, it was more like my consciousness observing an unconscious process.

In Tibetan Buddhism, the recognition of ones dreams is said to beneficial to the path. On the one hand, it makes you realize how much ordinary reality is like a dream, and on the other hand, it makes it possible to practice while you are sleeping. It is also said, that after you die, it will be easier to recognize the fact that you are in in-between state between this birth and the next. Usually, it is said, beings are propelled by their karma, caught up in the dream-like appearances of the in-between state, into their next birth, but that if you realize what's happening, you can affect your rebirth to be more positive, or even gain enlightenment in this state.

Words of the Buddha

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.


This is an unsourced quote I got off an internet list, but it sounds like the Buddha to me. A persistent problem Westerners face, which apparently is absent in Tibetans, is the tendency to continually and obsessively self-criticize. To hold ourselves to higher standards than anyone else, and suffer inner dejection when we fail to meet those expectations. It is as though we are constantly stabbing ourselves with a knife, over and over and over again. Wouldn't it be great if we stopped? There's a difference between stabbing yourself with a knife and openly, warmly, compassionately assessing yourself. If you feel like you did something wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't admit it, but it is better to lovingly accept yourself than to think "I'm no good." In fact the ability to merely see yourself as you are is a wisdom aspect of your mind, so when you notice certain things about yourself, even those you'd rather not accept, you are coming in contact with your own wisdom deity, your own Buddha nature. Or maybe it's better to say your inner wisdom nature is being revealed.

My Status

I haven't been posting as much lately, because my blogger energy has been depleted. When I began the path of recovery and I first began the Buddhist path, there was a lot I didn't understand and a lot I felt I needed to share in order to make progress. At this stage in my path, I don't have that same need, and have therefore stopped publishing regularly. Also, to be totally honest, I have started hanging out on Facebook and that has drained the energy I normally would funnel into a blog post. I posted the story about Lama Chenrezi's blessing because it was such a remarkable event of direct interest to my readers.

Anyway, I have no interest in drinking again, today. Alcohol robs you of your experience. It's like turning on a dimmer switch in your mind. There are outer appearances of having fun. People can be laughing, but in reality you are not present. Why would I want to do that? It's like grabbing for a vase of flowers, that starts to disappear every time you reach for it, but in reality far worse. There's a peculiar mental twist in alcoholics, which for some reason, only remembers the good parts of drinking, however illusory, and never fully contemplates the reality.

Lama Chenrezi's Blessing

Suppose a catastrophe was about to happen, and that you prayed and said mantras in order to avert it. Suppose then that you saw many Buddha and Chenrezi images and statues in a totally unexpected context, and that an event occurred to avert the catastrophe. That would be something that would make you think wouldn't it? Such a thing happened to me. A friend of mine was taking me to some good jazz, which I was looking forward to, but at one point he essentially listed what he expected to do at the club, and it involved us "washing down a couple of beers." For some reason my mind started playing with that, and thinking, well I've had enough meditative training that I might be able to drink a beer for social reasons without it leading down the inevitable path of self-destruction. This thought scared me enough to pray to the Lama and say mantras. The desire was still there as we were waiting for the subway, and suddenly the thought occurred to me that my playing with the thought to drink so obsessively was itself a sign that I was not going to be able to drink normally.
I kept saying mantras, and then my brother called, and it was awesome because he said he would come with me to the club, and I was able to tell him on the phone that I wasn't going to drink anything, in front of my other friend. Such a silly thing it seems, but it was tremendously important at the time. Right after that, we passed multiple shops with Buddhist statues in the window, and it seemed totally natural to me, and yet it was totally unexpected, because these were statues in the Tibetan tradition: statues of the Buddha, statues of Chenrezi. The odds of coming across such a thing are pretty slim, actually. It felt to me like the seal on the blessing that allowed my brother to unknowingly come to my rescue like that.

This reminds me of something I've heard multiple times in A.A. Everyone, at some point, the saying goes, will have no defense against that first drink, and such a defense must come from a higher power. It is amazing how closely my experience fits this general mold. I am not about to try to figure out how this happens to Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists etc. Clearly it does. The fact that all of these religions seem inconsistent is irrelevant to the true practitioner I think.

Musings on Pot

I used to smoke a lot of pot. Maybe not as much as some people, but quite a bit. I've not smoked any in over four years, nor do I want to, but it's a curious substance. I'm still a bit puzzled as to what it actually does to one's brain, one's mind, one's perception, one's thinking, and one's health. I do know that I experienced its effects in mostly a positive way. I found myself to be more open-minded, more in tune with aspects of the world around me, less biased by previous experience. I found a lot of energy to pursue things; research, poetry, visual art, and though some of the results are obviously the results of a drug-affected mind, some are not. Some aspects of pot's effect on me are similar to meditational experience, especially resting in the present moment and experiencing the world anew in each moment. However, there are aspects which are significantly different. Pot induced a craving for more of the same experience. (Meditation can do this too, actually.) The craving was so strong that my self-centeredness was exacerbated. I wanted to get stoned and enjoy myself and my interest in the happiness and welfare of others was diminished. Pot also scrambled my thinking and destroyed much of my common sense. However, I really can't deny that some of the most amazing and sublime experiences I've ever had were in the middle of nature, hiking in the mountains, stoned on pot. I've also had some less positive experiences where anxiety was a dominant component. I sense that these experiences were bound to decrease over time, and that many of the negative effects were bound to increase. For example, sometimes smoking pot would send me into a stupor, not the fresh constantly renewed mind state I described earlier. I would also get headaches from smoking it. On my path to recovery, I initially wanted to deny that pot had any positive aspects, since I was so close to it back then, I didn't want to allow any possibility that I would revert. However, now that I have some distance from it, I see that it can be profitable to be honest as well. I also see that the meditational path looks a lot sounder, thank goodness. After all, if one's happiness and spiritual progress is predicated on a drug, what happens when the drug runs out? What happens when the drugs effects on you change, as almost all addictive drugs do? This is just more of samsara, or worldy existence. Chasing after sense pleasures which are incapable of providing permanent happiness. Also, if you believe in reincarnation, what happens in the next life when your contact with the drug is broken? Meditational realization, the small amount of it that I have, is more stable than drug-induced changes of mind-state. Its effects could lead to the sort of craving and selfish behavior I described above, but not if it is combined with a spiritual program such as the Buddhist path, where the welfare of others is constantly reinforced. Indeed, Buddhists believe that it is with the blessing of enlightened beings that we make progress, so simple meditation is not enough, and could easily lead one astray in the manner of a drug or in some other manner. I was reminded the other day that in meditation, when something arises, you shouldn't block it, and when I meditated later that day I caught myself trying to block many things, thoughts I perceived to be negative. But actually by blocking them, I was giving them more energy so that they actually persisted, whereas when I stared at the thoughts they unraveled themselves. For example, I began to criticize someone internally, my mental censor deemed the though unworthy, and so I was about to turn away from the thought, but when I looked straight at the thought a wealth of positive aspects of the person spontaneously came to mind. This is very different from my pot-induced experiences. It was very easy for me to block things from coming to strongly to my conscious attention that I didn't want to examine.

Things do not arise (Candrakirti)

Candrakirti used the argument that inner and outer things do not arise from themselves, from something other than themselves, from both or from neither, i.e. causelessly. Since that covers all four possibilities this argument shows that nothing truly arises. For something to arise, it first has to be absent. The Samkhyas believed that things arose from themselves. Candrakirti refuted this saying that if something already existed, it would not need to arise. Arising has no meaning for something which already exists. The Hinayana Buddhist schools, the Vaibhasikas and Sautrantikas, believed that things arose from what was other than themselves. In other words, one moment gave rise to the next. Candrakirti argued that no connection exists between one moment and the next. A moment arises at the very instant that the moment before disappears. Something that has no connection with another thing can hardly be called its cause, otherwise one could say darkness is the cause of light and light the cause of darkness, just because one followed on from the other.

Since, in this way things arising from themselves and things arising from something else are refuted, one might try to argue that things arise from both. The Jains thought this. Candrakirti argued that such a position has the faults of both the previous positions.

Maybe one would like to argue that things arise from nothing? This would be like the belief of those that deny all cause and effect, including karma cause and effect. Such a school existed in India. They were called Ajivakas and Candrakirti refuted their view by saying that if things arose without cause what would be the point of doing anything? For instance, why should a farmer bother to plant his crops, if causes do not bring about effects? Such a belief, which suggests that everything is haphazard and chaotic, is totally nonscientific.

Maybe a film is a good example of how things are nonarising. We all know that when we see a moving film it is really a series of still frames in quick succession. It may look like one thing is affecting another on the screen but, in fact, except for the sequential arrangement, there is no connection between them. There are even gaps between the pictures. For something to cause something else there has to be a point where they meet, otherwise how could one affect the other? But a cause never exists at the same time as its effect. Once the effect has arisen the cause is past...

-From Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche

This passage really resonates with me, and I actually think it's rather mind-blowing. The way I interpret it, this argument of Candrakirti's shows that conceptual interpretations of reality are inherently self-contradictory, and this is a good prelude to meditation on the emptiness of reality. (Not in a nihilistic sense, but in a nonconceptual sense.) Once you reflect on this passage and see that all rational avenues are exhausted, the mind can rest in nonconceptuality.

Closing the Lower Door

One of the points of meditation posture is "closing the lower door" which basically means that you rock back and forth, right and left before meditation to make sure your buttocks are together. I had the occasion to ask a Lama yesterday whether this means you should refrain from passing gas while meditating, and she said yes. Now I know. I'm going to try this out to see how it works.

Wouldn't it be great if

there were a drug that made you feel sick unless you were helping others? The recreational drugs I am familiar with seem to make people more ego-centered and less interested in the welfare of others. What if there were a drug which did the opposite?

Merton on Inferior Forms of Religion

...[F]ew religions ever really penetrate to the inmost soul of the believer, and even the highest of them do not, in their social and liturgical forms, invariably reach the inmost "I" of each participant. The common level of inferior religion is situated somewhere in the collective subconscious of the worshipers, and perhaps more often than not in a collective exterior self. This is certainly a verifiable fact in modern totalitarian pseudo-religions of state and class. And this is one of the most dangerous features of our modern barbarism: the invasion of the world by a barbarity from within society and from within man himself. Or rather, the reduction of man, in technological society, to a level of almost pure alienation in which he can be brought at will, any time, to a kind of political ecstasy, carried away by the hate, the fear, and the crude aspirations centered about a leader, a propaganda slogan, or a political symbol. That this sort of ecstasy is to some extent "satisfactory" and produces a kind of pseudo-spiritual catharsis, or at least a release of tension, is unfortunately all too often verified. And it is what modern man is coming more and more to accept as an ersatz for genuine religious fulfillment, for moral activity, and for contemplation itself.


-Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience

The religious right immediately springs to mind. Clothing themselves in the exterior trappings of religion, yet mistaking their untamed subconscious for true religion, they ultimately fuel their own hatred and intolerance. Merton suggests elsewhere that the contemplative needs to get to what he calls the "true self," which is beyond our subconscious and, in fact, inseparable from God. The method to do this is the contemplative life, lived in isolation. Merton allows that this contemplative experience is probably the same as that described by Zen masters without using the word God. I wish that quiet contemplation were more of a fixture of modern Christianity, because I think its face would change. That would be a wonderful thing. When I read Thomas Merton, I am much more at home than when I listen to Christian evangelists, who often have an underlying energy of hatred, intolerance and fear. They are stirring the depths of our unconscious, of our libido, but they are not contacting genuine spiritual energy, as far as I can tell. Perhaps I'm lashing out a bit here, but I still believe what I'm saying one hundred percent, and the main point is not how terrible Christian fundamentalists are, but how wonderful it is to see that there is a true Christianity, a genuine spiritual Christianity. When I was in high school, I thought wistfully about becoming a (Christian) monk. I had a couple of reasons. At that point I was clothed in the trappings of religion, calling myself a Christian, and believing simplistic things about God, but not really having a genuine spirituality. I recall ranting to myself as I walked my dog about how terrible people are for not behaving morally, never perceiving that my anger was itself immoral. Not very spiritual; very close to my brothers and sisters in the Christian right at that point! The other reason I wanted to become a monk is that the world scared me. The prospect of getting a job and fending for myself scared me. I figured that being a monk would be an easy way to avoid the pressures of the world. I know now that the life of a monastic is very difficult, but it didn't strike me that way then, and I also know, that at least for Buddhists, it is considered improper or "wrong motivation" to take up the life of a monastic because one needs food or shelter. But anyway, I'm glad now two decades later, that my early aspirations for the monastic life are finding fruit, both in my Buddhist practice and in my appreciation for Thomas Merton.

New look

I decided to revamp my blog using one of the existing templates. The new picture is of the Tian Tin Buddha of Hong Kong, one of many giant Buddha statues in the world. The Leshan Giant Buddha is another example.

Three Year Anniversary

I haven't had a drop of alcohol in 3 years. I remember when going without a drink for a day was iffy.