In Pursuit of Mysteries

Buddhist Classwork and Retreats

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been taking a graduate class at the Institute of Buddhist Studies. This is a class on Esoteric Buddhism run by Dr. Richard Payne. Dr. Payne is well known in certain circles because he did his PhD dissertation on Shingon rituals, specifically the goma rite (the fire ritual) but covering the four basic rituals in general. Given my interest in both Japanese Buddhism and mikkyo as well as the fact that IBS is only a couple of miles away, it seemed like a good class to take.

I’ve been learning a bit. Most of the work so far has been related to reading. I was fortunate to already own all of the textbooks for the course but one, though I’d only read one of them before this (sitting down to read a 550 page book on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and its development is never light reading so I have a large stack of similar things waiting to be read). I’ve actually been surprised by how many new details or flows of development of Buddhist thought that I’ve been picking up this time around that I either hadn’t read before or hadn’t really put together into the right context. In that, I think that this is class has been good.

I have to right a roughly 25 page paper for the course and the topic is completely open ended (loosely inspired by our reading, which covers the development of esoteric Buddhism in India and Tibet and then developments in Japan and elsewhere). I’m feeling a bit stumped trying to figure out what to write about but I’m hoping something will come to me.

As a side effect of being enrolled for this course, I’m actually an official student of IBS, which means that I have library privileges at the Graduate Theological Union library and, I believe, at UC Berkeley. I went down to the library this last weekend and picked up a few obscure books (like an out of print book on Shugendo that I’ve seen around for $400) to read.

In addition to this class, I’ve been beta testing an online course for a program of classes in Buddhism being run by my teacher. The details aren’t public yet because things aren’t entirely done, as a whole, but I and others are working through coursework to test the system (and to do the courses) as students. This involves reading and regular written assignments along with some online discussion.

Needless to say, between the IBS course and this work, I’ve been doing a lot of Buddhist reading recently and a little bit of writing. This is keeping me busy after my day work doing QA on Firefox.

I am trying to decide what to do about a retreat this year. Right now, there are no retreats going on that I am being asked to attend and I haven’t found any, otherwise, that I would like to go on. What I’d really like to find is a seven or ten day meditation oriented retreat in order to work on my practice a bit more. My choices seem to, largely, be to either do a sesshin with a bunch of Zen people that I don’t know or to find a Vajrayana retreat with one of the Tibetan groups around here. The only ones that I really know locally are the people at Orgyen Dorje Den. They are a local Nyingma group and if they were having a meditation retreat, I’d probably go but I know of nothing scheduled. This is something to think about for later in the year. If anyone has suggestions, I’d love to know. Bay Area (or California) is best because travel time will cut into retreat time but I’m pretty open. My preference would be for the West Coast since I’ve found that three hour timezone shifts are deadly when doing a retreat schedule.

Arthur C. Clarke is Dead

According to Reuters, Sir Arthur C. Clarke died today.

The Clarke Foundation does not currently have a notice of it up but they do have a biography page for him for those unfamiliar with his work.

Clarke was on the shortlist of science fiction authors that I read as a child. I remember reading books, The Fountains of Paradise and Childhood’s End, very early on. Out of his work, the latter probably had the most impact on me. Another early memory of mine is my mother taking me to see a showing of 2001: A Space Odyssey (which he wrote the original story for) at her university. I was probably all of five years old at the time.

Authors like Clarke, Asmiov, and Silverberg all stand in a special place in my childhood memories as those that introduced me to science fiction in a major way (alongside Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft for my childhood fiction influences).

His three laws, especially the third, are often quoted today in a variety of circumstances:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

His passing saddens me but he was not a young man. I’ll ponder his gifts to us as an author whenever I look at my bookshelves.

E-sangha Drama Continues

Without a doubt, the entries on this blog that get the most traffic and comments over time are the ones to do with E-sangha. This is without any specific intention on my part but it seems to be where a lot of people arrive here. It may have something to do with the fact that if you search on “E-sangha” on Google, blog posts here are the sixth and seventh entries on the first page.

E-sangha is a web forum that promotes itself as being for all Buddhists of all traditions of practice. It has a large base of users and, in fact, its number of users is large enough, over time, that the very number and amount of activity acts to pull in online Buddhists who hear about the site. In reality, E-sangha is a very unfriendly place for many Buddhists. It is run by a small junta of moderators with a bit of an iron fist (not even with the velvet glove!). This group brooks no disagreement with their beliefs or methods. Members of the forum who don’t toe the line with great alacrity for this collective are quickly and quietly banned from the site.

Members of the moderator junta claim that they do what they do for the sake of Buddhism and the spread of the Dharma. In their opinion, incorrect beliefs or doctrines lead to trouble and confusion so their discussion is not allowed, even to show that they are wrong. At least one Zen priest has been banned, for example, for saying that he did not literally believe in or teach the reality of literal reincarnation as a Buddhist.

In additional to doctrinal control, only members of organizations or lineages of Buddhism recognized as legitimate by the moderators are allowed to state that they are monastics or other clergy (or to even have pictures of themselves in robes). If your organization or lineage is not seen as acceptable by the moderators, you cannot mention your ordination or speak as a monastic or cleric on pain of being banned from E-sangha. In order to prove credentials, E-sangha moderators demand all of the details of ordination from would-be representatives, including contact information. This is then processed and people are contacted, such as the ordaining clergy, in order to prove the bona-fides of the person. Those that don’t meet an acceptable standard or which are from an unrecognized group or lineage, are not allowed to represent themselves as monastics or other clergy.

Who are these moderators who run the site? Well, a list of them is present on the site but there are no details of their personal qualifications or backgrounds. They keep to their own hidden forums for their deliberations and discussions. There is no process to recall or remove a moderator available to site members and new moderators are chosen by the existing ones through a non-public process. Any discussion of moderator decisions is banned on the forums. The net effect of this is that there used to be days when I or others would log into a forum to check out a message thread from the day before only to find the entire thread was gone (and often the original poster as well). No messages would be available. Asking what had happened generally prompted a response of “Moderator actions cannot be publicly questioned.”

As it turns out, even saying in public that you are leaving E-sangha, as I did at one point, is grounds for banning from the site. Malcolm Smith, also known by the Buddhist name of “Namdrol” on E-sangha, is leader of the moderators and administrators of the site. He is a Vajrayana practitioner that (taking him at his word) underwent a three year retreat and is recognized to teach within the Sakya lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. He has been a bit of a lightning rod for criticism posted in comments on my previous entries here. Today, for the first time, he decided to come and engage with people. You can see his comments beginning here on a previous entry.

I give Malcolm a certain amount of credit for actually being willing to show up and challenge what people were saying in the comments on the post but he did a pretty poor job at presenting a case for how wonderful and neat E-sangha really is and how enlightened (pardon the pun) the moderators are on the site. Most of his responses seemed to really avoid any core criticism of the site. I won’t speak to his motivations as I don’t know them, but E-sangha is not well served by his stewardship and that of the current circle of pals there.

Why should anyone care? Well, there are very few decent places for Buddhists to gather online that have enough people to really sustain themselves. E-sangha has the potential to be one of these but not as it is currently operated. We live in a golden age, realistically, for Buddhists in many ways. People of a variety of traditions of practice have the means to communicate with each other in a manner which has not happened for many centuries, if ever. Every surviving tradition of practice can talk to and learn from all of our fellow Sangha members because of the combination of low-cost communication and a more globally connected culture. We should be taking advantage of this opportunity to communicate and not to use it as a mechanism for sectarianism, personal glorification, or politics.

For those interested, my previous entries on E-sangha are:

• E-sangha and Control Freaks
• Dharma Trolls, E-sangha, and Open Buddha
• More E-sangha Thought Control