“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, January 13, 2012

Nagarjuna Has No Quarrel with This

Reggie was preceptor when I took refuge. He is a good guy:

"The body gives us a way to experience the fundamental, primordial realities of the cosmos. It's an ancient Buddhist teaching that the body is the microcosm of the totality, as we’ve been talking about. So [in this meditation] we’re going into the body; and we touch the utter emptiness of the origins.

In the cosmos, the next moment was this initial coalescence or birth of an infinitely dense and infinitely small mass of energy, which is sometimes called the initial flaring forth, or the big bang. And we can actually experience that in our body, moment by moment."
I'm a little bit tired of explaining to young men that Buddhism is not about rejecting the physical, and that in fact, OOO is very congruent with Buddhism in this respect. Nihilism is attractive to them because they like to smash things. You can't blame them, their brains aren't fully mylenated yet...

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