A Monk Amok

Prayers for Disaster Victims

I've been watching some of the news coming out of China about the earthquake, as well as from Burma/Myanmar about the cyclone.  It's mind-boggling--the extent of the devastation.  The death toll has reached 78,000 in the cyclone tragedy.  As for the earthquake, the death toll is now over 28,000 according to this article.  There's also a danger from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24676343 in some areas that could increase the loss of life.

The thing that's really frustrating is that so much of the loss of life was avoidable in the case of the cyclone and the China earthquake.  In the case of Burma/Myanmar, the paranoid government's unwillingness to accept foreign aid and rescue workers may already be costing lives.  As for China, there was a report on the news last night (I can't remember which station, but it was national news) saying that over 6,000 schools had collapsed, many killing everyone inside, and that the Chinese government said it would investigate and hold responsible those who allowed such shoddy construction.

Of course the same could be said for Hurricaine Katrina.  More than 2,000 people are dead or missing and the city is still struggling to recover.  The government knew the levees were inadequate and did nothing to rectify the problem.  But honestly, isn't it foolish to build below sea level...on the coast?

The tsunami from 2004 took 283,000 lives according to this entry on Wikipedia.  I wonder what's in store for the future.

Please pray for all those whose lives were lost, and also for those whose ignorance has added to these tragedies. 

I've been Bikkhu-ed

A lot has happened in the past week.  First of all, I finally graduated. I now have a master's degree in Religious Studies with a concentration in Buddhism.  My thesis was approved (now I have to print two copies and submit them to the library) and have finished all my other papers...almost.  I have one short paper to finish up this week, but that should be no problem. 

Of course, I participated in the graduation ceremony on Saturday the 10th.  There were 26 graduates with 20 participating in the ceremony.  Ohhh it felt sooooo good to graduate!  Below are a few pics. 

This is me with Grace, our Admissions Counselor.  The nutty professor in the back is Dr. Locke, the acting chair of the Religious Studies department.

 

This is me with Eric Ahn, one of my RA's. He and Tina, another RA, rushed the stage right after I got my diploma to give me flowers.  Someone else did, too, but it was all a blur. It's a UWest graduation tradition.

This is Tiffany and Shakya. Shakya came back a bit early from Berkeley where's he's been studying this semester to attend graduation.  He's here for the summer, so we get to hang out for a few weeks before I head back to IL.  A few days after I get there, he's flying out for a week-long visit.

Then on Sunday, I attended the Wesak (Buddha's B-day) celebration at Dieu Phap, a Vietnamese temple about ten minutes from campus.  The abbot, Venereable Vien Ly, was a classmate of mine.  The Very Ven. Anhue, Vice-Abbot of Dieu Phap and an American monk and former teacher at UWest also lives at that temple, along with perhaps the senior most (in terms of number of years as a monk) American monk alive today, Very Ven. Anduc, aka Suhita Dharma.  He's the African American monk in the pics below.  He was ordained in 1965 and currently does work with prisoners.  He's also establishing a temple in Mexico with some spanish speaking students.  A very interesting crowd.

Well, after the Wesak ceremony, I was ordained a Bikkhu.  There were at least ten monks in the Vietnamese tradition, including those mentioned above, and one monk in the Tibetan tradition, Ven. Jamyang Gyatso (Sakyapa) and Ven. Mangala, a Theravada monk from Sri Lanka and a fellow student at UWest.  The abbot and vice-abbot agreed to do the ordination to assist with my transition into the Jogye order in South Korea.  Already being a Bikkhu makes that transition go smoother. 

I've wanted to do the ordination for several years, but didn't have the opportunity.  I'm so grateful for their willingness to do it for me.  Some of the monks in attendance had travelled from far places like Canada and Iowa for the days events and stayed on longer to participate.  I thanked them all heartily.  I want to be clear, also, that this wasn't just a means to an end--transferring into the Jogye order. I really wanted to do the Bikkhu ordination as a deeper commitment to the Dharma and the monastic path.

During the ceremony, we receive a kneeling cloth, a water strainer and a begging bowl. I already had a Tibetan kneeling cloth (called a "dingwa"), but the Mahayana traditions tend not to use begging bowls and water strainers, so we used a small metal tea strainer and Ven. Vien Ly arranged for a small begging bowl for me.  It's not what one would actually use for a begging bowl, but it was symbolic. 

I was in horrible pain for part of the ceremony given the way I was told to sit, so much so my hands were shaking.  I lived through it by concentrating on Ven. Anhue's voice.

Afterwards, we took a few photos: 

This is a shot of most of the monks who participated in the ordination.  There were, I think, ten monks from the Vietnamese tradition, one from the Tibetan tradition, and one from the Theravada tradition.  Ven. Anduc (aka Suhita), the African-American monk slightly to the right in this photo may well be, in terms of his monk-age, the longest-standing American monk alive today.  The monk in the red robe is Ven. Anhue, an American and former teacher at UWest.  The first character, "Hue," of my ordination name is the last character of his name.  On the far right of the photo is Ven. Vien Ly, the abbot of the temple and my classmate.

In this photo, to my left is Ven. Kiet and to my right is Ven. Mangala, both classmates from UWest.  Ven. Kiet is a Vietnamese-American monk and Ven. Mangala is a Theravada monk from Sri Lanka.  Then there's Ven. Anduc again and one of the Vietnamese monks whose name escapes me at the moment.

I'll put more photos in the photo album later.

Global Hunger

See this post on Danny's blog.

News Link

Check out this news link to stories related to Buddhism in Korea on the Buddhist Channel.

Cool Dharma Videos

I found a couple of interesting videos through Google last night.  The first one is of nuns doing the evening chants.  It's about 19 minutes long.  I also put it directly in my blog.  The other one is a photo montage set to music of a Buddhist funeral.  It's all quite interesting.  If I find more cool videos, I'll post them (or at least links to them) here.

The World Without Us

I just came across this video of what will happen to a house over a 500 year period with no human involvement.  It's a clear teaching on impermanance. 

I think I mentioned this book before: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.  It's all about what would happen to the world if humans suddenly disappeared.  Below are a few bits from this page of the website:

Two days after humans disappear, New York City's subways would "impassibly flood" without the pumps working.

In seven days, the emergency fuel supply to deisel generators that runs cooling water to nuclear reactor cores would run out.

In twenty years, common garden vegetables will have reverted to inedible wild plants.

In one hundred years, the half-million remaining elephants will have increased their population 20-fold due to the end of the ivory trade, but feral housecats, through competition, will have decreased populations of raccoons, foxes, etc....

In five hundred years, forests will have replaced suburbs, but aluminum and stainless steel machine parts and cookware will be found on the forest floor, their plastic handles broken but still solid.

For more, see the site listed above.  I read the book just before it came out, since I was working at a bookstore at the time (bookstores receive free advanced copies of books so that booksellers will read them and recommend them).  It was a fascinating read.  It really made me think about the impact we have on the environment as well as how precarious our time on earth as a species might be.

Buddhist News Sources

In addition to The Buddhist Channel, I've just come across another news source, though there may be some overlap in content.  It's lotus_in_the_hills.  Check it out for Buddhist news from around the world.

Blogger Buddies Roundup

Shout out to Danny Fisher for his post on The Dhamma Brothers, a group of prison inmate meditators.  The photo from his website is below.  There's also a video clip from the documentary.

The following cartoon is from a post at Daramusing.  It made me laugh.  Visit Ani-la's site or just click on the photo to enlarge it.  She also has some interesting video clips in the right hand column, including one of the Gyalwang Drukpa. 

Then there's brother Konchog in Mongolia blogging on Dreaming of Danzan Ravjaa.  The following photo is of a young Tibetan tulku, called Ngulchu Tulku, from this post.  Ven. Konchog describes him as a "major mover" in the Tibetan protests. The photo is by Harold Castro.  The post is from April 6th, but is still interesting.

Got any interesting tidbits?  Send 'em my way.

Last and probably least, a photo of yours truely.  I call this one "Gyatso the Grey."  I'm wearing a durumagi which is a Korean monk's coat.  This was a gift from my unsa sunim (vocation master), but it originally came from his unsa sunim.  The t-shirt I was wearing was actually maroon, but Shakya's girlfriend Tiffany played on the computer a bit and made it grey.  Shakya took the photo.

I also just ran accross a reference to a booklet I wrote a few years ago called "You Can Move Mountains."  I wrote it in 2005 after my last stint in Japan.  I can't remember where I found it, but there was a link to it back here on A Monk Amok.  It was a bit of a blast from the past.  It's in PDF format, so you should be able to download it with the link above if you're interested. 

The Last Master

The Buddhist Channel has an article about Joshu Sasaki Roshi by Andrea Bennett of the "Daily Bulletin."  The title of the article is interesting: "Last master of Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism shares insights at age 101," as if to say Sasaki Roshi is the last master of the entire Rinzai school of Zen.  Obviously, a mistake has been made.  For those of you who don't know, the Rinzai school is a Japanese form of Zen, called Lin Chi in Chinese.  Sasaki Roshi is one of the last Japanese masters who brought this form of Zen to the West, but he's certainly not the last master of the entire tradition.  Most of the rest of the Japanese masters have passed away, except perhaps for Eido Tai Shimano Roshi.

Many of those masters named several Dharma heirs, fully empowering them to pass on the tradition to the next generation.  In some cases, there are now Zen teachers in the U.S. that are two or three generations removed from their Japanese forbearers.  There are also now Dharma heirs to Seung Sahn, a Korean Seon (Zen) master, and perhaps also Samu Sunim the first two Koreans to bring the Korean Jogye order to Western practitioners.

It is interesting to note that the Tibetan tradition still doesn't have any fully qualified Western teachers, aside perhaps from a couple of Westerners recognized as reincarnations of previous Tibetan masters (called Tulku).  What I mean by fully qualified is that if the Tibetan masters suddenly disappeared off the face of the planet, would the tradition be able to continue, with all the empowerments and such, in the West?  The answer is no.

I think the problem is that Tibetan Buddhism isn't really being transmitted to the West.  Sure, there are some Americans, and presumably some Europeans with the title "Lama," but they generally don't give empowerments.  While many Westerners do enter the three year retreat, they tend to do so at the beginning of their practice and not after many years of study and practice as preparation.  Therefore, they aren't fully qualified at the end of the three year retreat. 

It has been suggested to me by more than one person that the Tibetans are only here for our money and have no intention of really passing on the fullness of the Tibetan tradition.  I'm not sure I entirely agree with that sentiment, but I can see why some might come to that conclusion.  If Westerners no longer require Tibetan teachers to fully pursue the practice, then the Tibetans might be afraid that all the resources coming from the West will dry up.  In the long run, however, if the Tibetan masters really want to secure support from the West, they need to let go of that control.  Western teachers will be able to build stronger and frankly larger communities of practitioners and will be better able to train them than Tibetans passing through for a few days at a time.  Those larger communities will be more stable capable of generating a great deal more material support for the Tibetan cause.

Money is probably only part of the equation, but the effects of this reticence from Tibetan teachers to really train their disciples to completely take over may already be surfacing.  I have heard from some Westerners who were interested in ordaining in the Tibetan tradition who looked around and saw that they would not be properly trained and educated and so they simply went elsewhere.  As the Dharma develops in the West and people look around and see that they can study under American or French or Brazilian teachers in some lineages, but that there are almost no fully qualified teachers in the Tibetan traditions, I'm afraid more people will choose to leave the Tibetan tradition or skip Tibetan Buddhism all together.

Those of you who read regularly know that I'm going to South Korea largely for the reasons cited above.  It's a shame, though....  The Tibetan tradition has wonderful meditation techniques and a rich philosophical tradition.  I just couldn't find a way to fully pursue it.  I looked at going to India but realized it would take me seven to ten years to save the money to go for a decade or more (given my earning potential), the least amount of time I would need to go to really learn the language, study hard and do retreat.  I looked around and saw that I had a choice: waste the next ten years working some job with the hope that maybe someday I would have the opportunity to really go for it, or stop wasting time and go to South Korea.

Of course, there are other reasons I became interested in the Jogye order.  Mostly, I really connected with my unsa sunim (vocation master) in a way I never connected with a Tibetan lama.  I think that's partly because he spent two years in India studying Tibetan Buddhism and the fact that he has a Ph.D. from U.W. Madison.  He's also an American citizen and has lived here for a very long time, so he gets where I'm coming from.  And, to be frank, I've come to the conclusion that Tibetan Buddhism is just to complicated for my taste.  The simplicity of the Zen tradition, though there are rituals and whatnot, is what I started with years ago.  The bells and whistles don't really interest me that much anymore.  Most importantly, I just don't think it's my karma to be able to pursue Tibetan Buddhism.  I struggled so long to find a way to make it work, and I couldn't.  But after coming to the University of the West and meeting some Korean venerables and my unsa sunim, it seems that I've found my way.

I almost forgot to mention that I had a conversation about this with an American friend who practices in the Tibetan tradition (Nyingma lineage). He said he wouldn't be surprised if empowerments die out in Tibetan Buddhism in the West simply because only Tibetans (and Ladakhis and Bhutanese, etc....) can give them.  I said I thought there would still be Western students who would seek out empowerments, but that in the future perhaps a tradition of more general Mahayana without the empowerments might evolve from the Tibetan tradition that would include the philosophical tradition and meditation techniques not requiring empowerments.

In any case, I'd love to hear some of your opinions on the issues raised in this post.   

Survey for Children of Buddhist Parents

I just got an email from the Jamyang Study Group> in France.  They are conducting an online survey they say is for Buddhist youth, but from the looks of it it's for people of any age who grew up in a Buddhist household.  There survey itself is here.