GPOYW Graduation Edition

I’ve been neglecting gpoys lately, but I’m pretty sure that a suited-up version makes up for lost time. I graduated this morning and now I’m off to celebrate (I swear I’m happier than I look!). Regular posting will resume tomorrow.

Cheers!

It looks like I’m almost done.

On Thursday I passed my last exam, last week I had the thesis printed and delivered (I’m pretty sure you can make sense of the title by yourself) and in ten days I will graduate.

A lot of things are going to change in the next few months for me, and I can’t wait :)

Albert Einstein Institution - Publications - Self-Liberation

Self-Liberation

A Guide to Strategic Planning for Action to End a Dictatorship or Other Oppression

by Gene Sharp, with the assistance of Jamila Raqib 

Self-Liberation (Download PDF) 

(You may also order hard copies.) 

This strategic planning guide is intended to assist people who wish themselves to plan a grand strategy, or super plan, to achieve their liberation from oppression and to build a more free and democratic system.

(via drwh0) 

History of Violence in Buddhism →

dougstumblr:

Armed Buddhist monks in Thailand are not an exception to the rule; they are contemporary examples of a long historical precedence. For centuries monks have been at the helm, or armed in the ranks, of wars. How could this be the case? But more importantly, why did I (and many others) hold the belief that Buddhism=Peace (and that other religions, such as Islam, are more prone to violence)?

It was then that I realized that I was a consumer of a very successful form of propaganda. Since the early 1900s, Buddhist monastic intellectuals such as Walpola Rahula, D. T. Suzuki, and Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, have labored to raise Western awareness of their cultures and traditions. In doing so, they presented specific aspects of their Buddhist traditions while leaving out others.

You have monks taking up arms and marching in the Russo-Japanese War, or earlier messianic battles in China when they thought killing people would bring them closer to enlightenment (a Ten Stage Process). Buddhists have fought against non-Buddhists, or other Buddhists. Japanese Buddhists fought to cleanse the impure Buddhist lands in China and Korea. Thai and Burmese fought for centuries against each other, each claiming religious authority as Cakravartins. This is what the book covers.

via Monks With Guns: Discovering Buddhist Violence | RDBook | ReligionDispatches. 

The recent bloody violence in Sri Lanka and Thailand are but examples of this. Yes, Sri Lanka’s violence has traditionally recognized political and cultural components to it, but the Janata Vimukti Peramuna had very clear religious motivations voiced during their assassinations and calls to exterminate the LTTE.

Shaku Soen and D.T. Suzuki, along with Paul Carus, were instrumental in bringing Japanese Zen to this country. There is a long history of this, covered quite well by Verhoeven in “Americanizing the Buddha.” And lets not forget that Suzuki and his teacher Soen were at the vanguard of Japanese militarism during the Russo-Japanese and second World Wars. In Suzuki’s own words, Buddhism must protect the nation.

Walpola Rahula did the same for Sri Lankan Buddhism in the United States, and he had similar concepts of religiously justified violence in Sri Lanka.

In a way, I wish I could return to that dream of Buddhist traditions as a purely peaceful, benevolent religion that lacks mortal failures and shortcomings. But I cannot. It is, ultimately, a selfish dream and it hurts other people in the process.

Buddhist Warfare certainly contributes to the broader discussion of religious violence, but on a more intimate and local level, I hope this collection will effect some significant change in the way Buddhism is perceived in the United States. Only time will tell.

In the end, what I find odd is how we try to displace a very long and lengthy history as anecdotal or enigmatic examples of people gone awry, instead of seeing the nature of religious violence present in Buddhist traditions (as well as others)

I’m not surprised. The Buddha himself was a member of the warrior caste before becoming enlightened. What he then taught wasn’t a blanket ideology nor a social or political philosophy, but an individual path. Everyone who holds the belief Buddhism=Peace just hasn’t grasped this individualism.

In Buddhism peace and love aren’t labels you can put on with propaganda, they’re absence (of hate, violence, suffering), and to obtain this absence one has to practice everyday, Buddhist monks included.

The Dalai Lama is often criticized by his fellow countrymen - Tibetan Buddhists who want to fight for their independence - because of his non-violent approach: between the two, who would you call Buddhist?

(via honeymanifesto)

Notecard (No Thought Exists…) by Mel Bochner

"Talking about art is like dancing about architecture."

Source unknown

I think I’ll use this quote for my thesis. It fits perfectly with this essay by Susan Sontag.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

(Source: toniiu)

"In Japan sexuality is in sex, not elsewhere; in the United States, it is the contrary; sex is everywhere, except in sexuality."

Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (1970)

Currently on my desk

I. Nakane, Silence in Intercultural Communication

Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō

Z. Shibayama, A flower does not talk

H. Nakagawa, Introduction à la culture Japonaise

C. Nakane, Japanese society

R. Davies-O. Ikeno, The Japanese mind

R. Barthes, Empire of signs

S. Maitland, A book of silence

A. Jaworski, The power of silence: social and pragmatic perspectives

M. Picard, World of silence

A list of some of the books I’ve read/I’m reading for my thesis.

The World at the Mercy of an Idiot

We need to do quality journalism in order to lower the fever of sensationalism.

[…] We need to give voice to those entitled to speak and not just to the ones who guarantee to make more noise or to put up a show.

[…] Is it really so hard to imagine ourselves not giving up and deciding that our lives can not be taken hostage by the last image that passes before our eyes?

Revalorizing the Trades →

hellotoni:

equivoque:

Having taught in art schools for most of my four decades in the classroom, I am used to having students who work with their hands—ceramicists, weavers, woodworkers, metal smiths, jazz drummers. There is a calm, centered, Zen-like engagement with the physical world in their lives. In contrast, I see glib, cynical, neurotic elite-school graduates roiling everywhere in journalism and the media. They have been ill-served by their trendy, word-centered educations.

Words and thoughts can be as solid as clay, and equally manipulable. But I’m sure the writer already knows it, since she’s using a lot of generalizations and the questionable (to say the least) premise [school -> work -> happiness].

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

William Butler Yeats

Just passed an exam on Yeats, so let’s celebrate with a nihilist, death-centered poem!

acedia

tameourways:

[uh-SEE-dee-uh]

Definition: sloth.

-noun

• Sloth.

• Laziness or indifference in religious matters.

e.g. His tales give the impression of a man cursed with an incurable disenchantment with life, a malady about midway between acedia and ennui.

- James Norman Hall, Under a thatched roof

[via]

The term has also a positive meaning, even though no one use it anymore. Its Greek etymology is ἀκηδία, from ἀ- (without) + κῆδος (care, troubles), meaning absence of pain or cure. The Romans associated it to otium, the detached state (in opposition to negotium, the productive state) that scholars needed to study and achieve virtue.

The negative (and dominant) connotation was born in the Christian world: acedia is the deadly sin of neglecting to love and live for God, although some Christian writers (like Petrarch) still defended the bright side of the term, referring to simple habits, self-restraint, proximity to nature, diligent study, reflection, writing, and friendship.

Then in modern times the spiritual torpor became laziness: acedia causes less production and less consumption, an equal deadly sin in a work-centered society.