Buddha Soup

Saicho’s Ganmon (願文?, “Saichō’s Prayer”) which included his personal vows:

So long as I have not attained the stage where my six faculties are pure, I will not venture out into the world.
So long as I have not realized the absolute, I will not acquire any special skills or arts (e.g. medicine, divination, calligraphy, etc)
So long as I have not kept all the precepts purely, I will not participate in any lay donor’s Buddhist meetings.
So long as I have not attained wisdom (lit. hannya 般若), I will not participate in worldly affairs unless it be to benefit others.

May any merit from my practice in the past, present and future be given not to me, but to all sentient beings so that they may attain supreme enlightenment.

Phie Ambo about Richard Davidson from Danish Documentary on Vimeo.

By Emily Esfahani Smith

In her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson offers a radically new conception of love.

Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.

Rather, it is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in “It’s a Wonderful World” when he sang, “I see friends shaking hands, sayin ‘how do you do?’ / They’re really sayin’, ‘I love you.’”

Fredrickson’s unconventional ideas are important to think about at this time of year. With Valentine’s Day around the corner, many Americans are facing a grim reality: They are love-starved. Rates of loneliness are on the rise as social supports are disintegrating. In 1985, when the General Social Survey polled Americans on the number of confidants they have in their lives, the most common response was three. In 2004, when the survey was given again, the most common response was zero.

Lonely people who are looking for love are making a mistake if they are sitting around and waiting for love in the form of the “love myth” to take hold of them. If they instead sought out love in little moments of connection that we all experience many times a day, perhaps their loneliness would begin to subside.

“The practice of the Buddha’s teaching can been called the serious pursuit of
true happiness, with the emphasis on the serious and the true. Serious not in the
sense of grim but in the sense of sincere, unwilling to settle for anything less than
genuine.

True here means a happiness that doesn’t change, a happiness that
doesn’t let you down. This is why so many of the Buddha’s teachings focus on suffering,
because most of the happiness—or the things that we take for happiness
in daily life—really do end up causing suffering as they change. So many times the
happiness we gain turns into something else.”- Thanissaro Bhikkhu

What can we learn from Chih-i’s views on “Zen” (ch’an)?

For one thing, it may give us pause to consider again the role and meaning of “Zen/ch’an/dhy„na” for Buddhism, or for
individual Buddhists. Is Zen (dhy„na meditation) the central (or perhaps only) practice—and even the goal itself—of a Buddhist, or is it only one (and not necessarily even the most important) of many means for practicing and realizing the Buddha Dharma? For Chih-i and Lotus Sutra Buddhism, the answer is clearly the latter. The question is, what is the
answer for “Zen Buddhism”?