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.
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.
Vegetarianism
A bunch of people know that I have been eating (or trying to, at least) less meat for a while. I did this as a general move towards becoming a vegetarian. This last week, I realized that I wasn’t really moving quickly in that direction and it felt a bit hypocritical, given my intentions. Because of this, I simply decided to do it and be a vegetarian. We will see how much I may wind up regretting this decision later. :-)
I’m not a vegan, before people ask. At this moment, I will happily exploit the labor of bees, for example, by eating their sweet bee vomit. I’ll also happily steal milk from cows and eat unfertilized chicken eggs. Ideally, these would all be from free ranging versions of these creatures (but I’m not sure that the bees care much). I don’t buy into the near-Marxist idea that not only should I not eat the flesh of my animal brethren but that I should not exploit their labor as well. I do recognize the conditions of the factory farms and the suffering that they cause and that is to be kept in mind.
I am doing this largely for a couple of reasons. I’d like to say that the first is my sense of ethics but what really pushed it over the edge for me is health and sustainability (the latter of which relates to ethics as well). Just about every male member of my dad’s family over the age of 45 or 46 has had a heart attack. Now, these are Wyoming working folks who eat a lot on the grease end of the food spectrum but…damn. My dad was the exception but he had angioplasty, which is related to the same problem. While he was dying from liver failure for a while, what killed him was a heart attack in the end. A vegetarian diet is, realistically, a healthier option for me, especially the absence of red meat, bacon and other things which I love but who long for my death. I don’t smoke and I only have an occasional beer socially so my main lifestyle issues are too much coffee and eating badly, which leads to my weight problem. I’m beginning to exercise more and I’m changing my diet. I think people can see where this goes…
Realistically, the amount of food we use to feed cattle and pigs is just unconscionable for me in the long run. That food should be used for other things, like humans, rather than for giving Americans our “meat with every meal” diet. This is part of proper sustainability in the future, I believe.
Along with all of this is the fact that, frankly, I’m a Buddhist. I’ve taken a vow to not kill, along with others. While it is culturally accepted in the West for Buddhists to often eat meat and this is also the case in places like Japan and Tibet, I do feel that this should be lessened or even ended as part of the vows that I have taken. I have felt a certain cognitive dissonance over time between the vows and culturally accepted practices within Buddhism. (By some measures, I shouldn’t even drink the occasional beer either but this isn’t the ten commandments but are, instead, choices that was consciously make for positive reasons, to promote life or clear-headedness, for example.) I feel that my being a vegetarian will bring me better in line with my spiritual and ethical beliefs.
Now, my friends need not worry. I’ll neither become the “angry vegan” that we all know and love nor the “preaching vegetarian.” If you wish to eat things, have at it. Any preaching in this regard will only be through example or in conversations where people ask about it. Few people like being told how they should leave (even when they may secretly and guiltily agree in their hearts). Let’s face it, we’re all hypocrites in so many ways, it makes no sense to lecture people about their conduct unless you’re staging an intervention or you are asked for your opinion.
I figured it was worth mentioning all of this on a few levels. I doubt it will come up much unless you eat with me or unless I find aspects of it difficult. I know I wasn’t 100% clear with my wife on all of this so she was surprised by the decision (which is not good when she cooks most of our dinners). I figured that no one else should be surprised either and, perhaps, others may feel inspired to eventually do the same thing.
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