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.
Shunryu Suzuki and my Father-in-law
One interesting thing came up this weekend when we were at Green Gulch Farm. My father-in-law, Leon, came along with us and we had a chance to chat a bit here and there. I had been told in previous years, in a vague way, that he had done some sitting meditation previously but there hadn’t been many details given. He doesn’t make much small talk so I’m not surprised.
While we were there at Green Gulch, Leon went to a meditation session without the rest of us. He mentioned to me over dinner later that, based on something that was said, he thought that the place had something to do with a teacher, Suzuki. I told him that, yes, it was part of the San Francisco Zen Center and that had been founded by Shunryu Suzuki. Leon then told me that he’d studied for about six months with a zen teacher named “Suzuki” in 1962. He said that the group had met near Japantown in San Francisco in a building that was a converted synagogue (which probably stayed in the memory of my father-in-law since he’s Jewish). Later this same day, Leon mentioned that he’d seen a photo of the same teacher in the library upstairs, which is where I had noticed a picture of Suzuki Roshi earlier as well.
On getting back to town, I checked wikipedia and other information that I had about Suzuki’s history. It turns out that he came over in 1959 from Japan. He was brought to America to be a priest at Soko-ji, the only Soto Zen temple in San Francisco, which served the Japanese community. Soko-ji was, unsurprisingly now, in a converted Jewish synagogue. There is a picture of the temple in Crooked Cucumber, which is a biography of Suzuki. It was on Bush street and looked like a synagogue, not a Japanese Buddhist temple, so no work was done to convert the exterior. At this location in 1960, Suzuki Roshi did the first sesshin (a three day one) ever held in North America and began to take on more and more non-Japanese students. (I have elsewhere been told that this caused a bit of trouble as members of the Japanese community were not entirely pleased with this turn of events at the time.) In 1961, Richard Baker, who was Suzuki Roshi’s later successor and the founder of Green Gulch Farm, showed up and began to study with Suzuki Roshi. (As an aside, a friend of Baker’s, who was hanging around with him in Fields Book Store having a discussion, sent Baker to see Suzuki. Fields is currently owned by a friendly acquaintance of mine who is probably reading this…) Philip Kapleau, who became very well known later on, showed up in January, 1962, for a visit which he wrote about in a Zen newsletter, Wind Bell. It was only in the later 1960s that the new center (now called the “City Center“) was purchased and Suzuki Roshi left Soko-ji.
So, it turns out that my father-in-law was sitting at Soko-ji and studying with Suzuki Roshi at the same time as Richard Baker and a number of the other early movers and shakers in American Zen. The funny thing is that Leon did not know that Suzuki Roshi was famous or had gone on to seriously kickstart Zen in the non-Japanese population here in the United States. Leon was flipping through Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a collection of Suzuki’s talks on Zen, and he’d never seen it before and had no idea it was one of the most influential books in Zen Buddhism in the West.
I asked Leon what had happened and why he had quit going there. He said that he’d sat often for about six months, riding out with a friend who had a car. He’d attended the Saturday meals, he said, which happened with the sitting, but he wound up moving out of San Francisco (to Berkeley, where he lives now, I assume). Since he had no car and this was before BART, he had simply stopped going. He didn’t really have a lot to say about it and I didn’t want to pry overly but what a strange connection. To have been with Suzuki Roshi at that time, at the very beginning of such an influential change, and then to not even know about all of the things that had happened in the 46 years since then. It was an odd thing to come out during this weekend, that’s for sure.
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