In Pursuit of Mysteries

Wedding at Green Gulch

R and I went out to Green Gulch again today. This is the second time this month after never having gone there before. My friend, Nathan went with us and he’s staying here at the house for a few days after coming down from Seattle. (Mostly, he’s spending time with my Nintendo Wii but we’ll see…)

The wedding was between Ryan and Yuhuan, two members of the San Francisco Zen Center. Ryan and I used to work together 13 years ago at Spry, back when “Internet in a Box” was the big product there and I was a webmaster. Ryan went on to Amazon and I went to Microsoft following this. I met Nathan through Ryan and the community of Burning Man people that he hung out with in Seattle back when Ryan had no particular interest in Buddhism. Independently, we both moved to the Bay Area and reconnected at various points largely though Nathan.

The wedding was a nice, brief ceremony. It was conducted by the abbot there at Green Gulch and largely consisted of the bridge and groom repeating their precept vows followed by more traditional wedding vows. The gathered attendees chanted the Metta Sutra together as well:

[...]
This is what should be done
By one who is skilled in goodness,
And who knows the path of peace:
Let them be able and upright,
Straightforward and gentle in speech.
Humble and not conceited,
Contented and easily satisfied.
Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways.
Peaceful and calm, and wise and skillful,
Not proud and demanding in nature.
Let them not do the slightest thing
That the wise would later reprove.
Wishing: In gladness and in saftey,
May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born,
May all beings be at ease!
[...]

Afterwards, there was a vegan reception and we got a chance to hang out with some other Zen Center members that Ryan knows and some mutual acquaintances of Nathan’s and mine from the private e-mail list, Void, that Nathan runs. Two of the people that we spoke with, Walker and Evan, were a couple that had met while living at Green Gulch. He and she were able to explain quite a bit about the day to day life of living at the monastery, which was very interesting to Rebecca and me.

While we were out there, I made a point of tracking down where Shunryu Suzuki’s memorial marker was placed. When we had been out last time, I hadn’t realized it was there and only found out after we returned. Given his pivotal role in American Zen, it seemed a worthwhile thing to do.

Seeds of Change for Review

This must be my week for getting advanced reader’s copies of books. I received a copy of Seeds of Change today from the editor, John Joseph Adams. He’s made some electronic PDF copies available to bloggers and some others for review. Given the guidelines from him, I won’t have the review up until August, a couple of weeks before the book comes out.

The book description is:

Imagine the moment when the present ends, and the future begins - when the world we knew is no more and a brave new world is thrust upon us. Gathering stories by nine of today’s most incisive minds, Seeds of Change confronts the pivotal issues facing our society today: racism, global warming, peak oil, technological advancement, and political revolution. Many serve as a call to action. How will you change with the future? These nine stories sow seeds of change across familiar and foreign territory, from our own backyards to the Niger Delta to worlds not yet discovered. Pepper, the mysterious mercenary from Tobias S. Buckell’s Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin, works as an agent for change - if the price is right - in “Resistance.” Ken MacLeod envisions the end-game in the Middle East in “A Dance Called Armageddon.” New writer Blake Charlton imagines a revolutionary advance in cancer research in “Endosymbiont.” Award-winning author Jay Lake tackles technological change and the forces that will stop at nothing to prevent it in “The Future by Degrees.” Other stories by K.D. Wentworth, Jeremiah Tolbert, Mark Budz, Ted Kosmatka, and Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu range from the darkly satirical to the exotic. All explore the notion that change will come.

Ken MacLeod has been a favorite author of mine for most of a decade. I’m a big fan of Tobias Buckell and his work (including his blog) and I just finished Jay Lake’s Mainspring a couple of days ago. Overall, this looks to be a fine collection of authors and an interesting focus for an anthology. I expect that I’ll enjoy it.

One Sangha

I am starting a Buddhist group blog now, called “One Sangha,” if I can recruit some fellow bloggers for it. I had made some noise in that direction with OpenBuddha, which still has an empty blog sitting there. On some discussion with a friend, I was donated the OneSangha.org domain that he had registered but wound up not using.

My goal is to get a group of between four and seven bloggers who are Buddhists to all contribute posts written for that blog. They can be on any Buddhist topic or ideas, news, or other items of interest to Buddhists. The overall intent is one of unifying the different strands of Buddhism together, hence the name. We are all, after all, one sangha. There are not multiple sanghas (well, except in practice, pun intended). One of the great joys of the current age for Buddhists is that we have access to the traditions, practices, and teachers of all of the surviving forms of Buddhism with very little actual effort. This should be a golden age for Buddhism and we should be taking advantage of the opportunities it brings to enrich our understanding of how we practice Buddhism for ourselves but also the possibilities for a Buddhism in the centuries to come. I think this is a fairly noble ideal.

I would like to have the bloggers express the diversity of Buddhism. Ideally, I think the blog should have a practitioner of one of the major Mahayana meditative traditions, like Chinese Chan or Japanese Zen, a Pure Land tradition (which means probably a Japanese school), a Vajrayana or Esoteric Buddhist practitioner (probably of the Tibetan variety), and a Theravadan or Insight Meditation practitioner (since the latter schools are drawn from the Theravadan tradition). Obviously, there will probably be overlap and more people than that but that would express the kind of variety that I would like to see. People signing up would work with me (as I plan to blog as well), on codifying the thrust of things. The blog will not be a platform for sectarianism, which I will say from the outset. That would completely go against the “One Sangha” intent. I would expect that people would blog at least one post a week, which is a fairly low requirement. If we had five people, that would be a blog post on most days of the week, which would work out well.

I don’t expect that the people participating to necessarily be academics or accredited teachers (such as monastics or priests), though those would be more than welcome.

If this sounds interesting to you or if you know someone who might be interested, please feel free to comment. You can also e-mail me as “albill” on the domain of this blog, “arcanology.com” and I will receive the message.