Growing Zen

*all quotations from Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home*

Thich Nhat Hanh has a great saying: "The finger is not the moon." That is, the thing that points towards something is not that thing itself. Picture being outside. You don't see the moon. Your companion does, so they use their finger to point toward the moon, to draw your attention to the right area in the sky so you can see it. The pointing finger is invaluable in getting you to see the moon, but you don't mistake the finger as the moon. You abandon the finger and look at the moon.

The same goes for God or the Divine or ultimate reality whatever it is you know or experience. We can use human concepts to get us closer to understanding God, but those are fingers. They are not God as God is, just ways for helping us understand God. If we cling to these concepts, we're going to get it wrong. If we mistake these concepts for the ultimate definition of God, we'll actually end up further away from God, because "my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your way my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9). And if you cling to these concepts, these notions, and you hang all of your faith on them, and they're inevitably inadequate, not only have you set up a false god for yourself, you're going to end up with a heck of a crisis of faith, because sooner or later, these fingers will be revealed as not, in fact, being the moon. Having your religious or spiritual convictions and paradigms proven wrong tends to be utterly traumatic. “We have so many wrong notions and ideas; it is dangerous to believe in them, because someday we may find out that that idea is a wrong idea, that notion is a wrong notion, that perception is a wrong perception. People living with a lot of wrong perceptions, ideas, and notions, and when they invest their life in them it is dangerous." (Thay)

“When you have faith, you have the impression that you have the truth, you have insight, you know the path to follow, to take. And that is why you are a happy person. But is it a real path, or just the clinging to a set of beliefs? These are two different things. True faith comes from how the path you are taking can bring you life and love and happiness every day. You continue to learn so that your happiness and your peace, and the happiness and peace of the people around you, can grow. You don’t have to follow a religious path in order to have faith. But if you are committed to only a set of ideas and dogmas that may be called faith, that is not true faith. We have to distinguish. That is not true faith, but it gives you energy. That energy is still blind and can lead to suffering; it can cause suffering for other people around you. Having the kind of energy that can keep you lucid, loving, and tolerant is very different from having energy that is blind.  You can make a lot of mistakes out of that kind of energy. We have to distinguish between true faith and blind faith. That is a problem in every tradition. ...

If you call yourself a Buddhist [and I would replace “Buddhist” with whatever your religion is] but your faith is not made of insight and direct experience, then your faith is something to be re-examined. Faith here is not faith in just a notion, an idea, or an image. When you look at a table, you have a notion about the table, but the table might be very different from your notion. It’s very important that you get a direct experience of the table. Even if you don’t have a notion of the table, you have the table. The technique is to remove all notions in order for the table to be possible as a direct experience.”
(Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home, bits from pages 71-82)

Story time :) 

1. When I was little, we had the Sunday School lesson about Jesus walking on the water. I think I was five years old. The next time we went to the beach, I decided I would walk on the water. I had faith. That's all you needed, because Peter started falling when his faith wavered. So, completely confident, my faith filling, suffusing my body throughout my limbs and torso and swelling my throat, I stepped into the waves.

And my foot went straight through the water to the sand below.

Maybe I wasn't deep enough. I tried again, further out, summoning the overwhelming sensation of faith, and stepped forward again.

My foot hit the sand. It kept hitting sand. I never did walk on the water.

2. About a year later, we had a lesson on how God hears and answers our prayers. I know it's a perennial topic, so I'd heard it many times before. But this time I was taken with the desire to "experiment upon the word" for myself. So, the lesson went, if you had enough faith and listened hard enough, you'd get an answer to any prayer. I went home and knelt on my bedroom floor and racked my brain for a question I wanted answered. I was a huge dinosaur fan and my mom had recently shattered my world by suggesting that maybe dinosaurs didn't actually live on the earth, that maybe a T-rex hadn't actually stepped right where my desk was at school. So I decided I would ask for the truth of what had happened to the dinosaurs. I called up that suffusive sensation of faith and prayed clearly and waited for what felt like forever for a voice to come out of the heavens to tell me what the deal was with my beloved dinosaurs. I never heard a voice. I never got an answer.

I shared those two stories to illustrate the kind of literal kid I was. I don't know if it is my natural inclination to be literal, or if it was the way in which these lessons on faith were simplified for kids my age, or what. But I also transferred this same literalness to my understanding of God. Somehow, in the emphasis on a personal and knowable God I had growing up, I had developed this concept that God was some guy who was somehow immortal and somehow lived in some fixed point in space called heaven and somehow created and controls the entire universe. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a personal and knowable God. But somehow the idea got simplified and "notionalized" for me, and I didn't have any of the divine mystery of God in my concept of God. So, ironically, I felt farther and more isolated from God, because I was looking at God too literally in my human understanding.

Living Faith

If "your faith is not made of insight and direct experience, then your faith is something to be re-examined. Faith here is not faith in just a notion, an idea, or an image. When you look at a table, you have a notion about the table, but the table might be very different from your notion. It’s very important that you get a direct experience of the table. Even if you don’t have a notion of the table, you have the table. The technique is to remove all notions in order for the table to be possible as a direct experience.” (Thay)

So the thing for me is to study as much as I can, to see the table from as many points of view as possible, to help me to create the most complete picture. But personal experience of God, of the divine, is the most important.  "In the teaching of the Buddha, faith is made of a substance called insight or direct experience. When a teacher knows something, he or she wants to transmit that to disciples. But she cannot transmit the experience, she can only transmit the idea. The disciple has to work through it by himself. The problem is not to communicate the experience in terms of ideas or notions. The issue is how to help the disciple go through the same kind of experience. For instance, you know how a mango tastes, and you may like to try to describe the taste of the mango, but it is better to offer the disciple a piece of mango so that he can have a direct experience." (Thay) 

If we cling to notions, to snapshots of the actual thing, rather than going back to the thing itself and experiencing it over and over, we stagnate. We cling to something that is not real, that does not promote real, living faith. If you have one concept of God and say, “This is it. This is all there is. This is exactly how and what and why God is,” you’ve replaced God with a snapshot. Actually, more like a sketch that you drew yourself. And that sketch is elevated to the status of a false god, if it takes the place of your seeking to continue to experience God Himself. Your certainty keeps you from experiencing God. And really, who can definitively say exactly what God is? God’s ways are not man’s ways. We have a very limited understanding through a very mortal lens. We see through a glass darkly, as it were. So, to a mortal mind, the divine will always defy description. God is not to be bound be mere words. I think that’s important to remember. It would save a lot of bad feeling of people arguing about how they see God.

I watched the BBC's Hawking yesterday. Totally captivated my imagination. Those guys deal with and say the same things about science, physics, the origin of the universe, as I've come to conclude through my study and meditation on scripture and God. Below are some quotes I've read in the last few days that go along with the idea that God the power is the Law of reality that created, governs, and maintains the universe.

"I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science," he said. "The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws." -Stephen Hawing

Quickly, on the subject of miracles: I don't think the above quote negates the possibility or reality of miracles. I think that God has to operate within the laws of nature and science, since God the person is one with God the power, which is the Law of nature and science. For God the person to break or go contrary to this Law (God the power) would be to obliterate God's existence. I believe in miracles. I believe God has all power, since God (person and Law, which are the same) is all power. So of course there are miracles, those things which seem to defy reason or reality. But miracles must necessarily actually be in accordance with the Law, or else the whole thing is ca-put. You know?

Einstein's Theory of Relativity, bolded bit going along with the idea of interdependence:
As summarized by an American astronomer, Professor Henry Norris Russell, of Princeton, in the Scientific American for November 29 [early 1910s, I think?], Einstein's contribution amounts to this:
"The central fact which has been proved--and which is of great interest and importance--is that the natural phenomena involving gravitation and inertia (such as the motions of the planets) and the phenomena involving electricity and magnetism (including the motion of light) are not independent of one another, but are intimately related, so that both sets of phenomena should be regarded as parts of one vast system, embracing all Nature..." H. A. Lorentz, The Einstein Theory of Relativity. Public domain book on my Kindle, so no accurate page number, sorry.

And, Buddhist and the Dalai Lama's thoughts on the origin of the universe:
"These long speculative descriptions [the Buddhist explanation of the universe, its origin and disposition, etc]--elaborated by successive schools and often contradicting one another--run counter to Sakyamuni's [The Buddha, Siddharta Gautama] fundamental recommendation not to plunge 'the cord of thought into the impenetrable.' The question the eternity of the universe, and consequently of its origins, actually seems to have been part of the 'fourteen unexplained views.' The Buddha even said, 'Knowledge of all these things cannot make anyone take one step forward on the road to holiness and peace.' His only answer was silence.

Nevertheless, as the Dalai Lama told me on several occasions, on the one hand, events without a cause cannot be accepted, and on the other hand, it is absolutely necessary to pay attention to the advances of science to modify, if need be, the Scriptures. Thus there is no reason to be surprised at how little he insists on going back to ancient theories. He prefers to stick to the Big Bang and to try to find in it an explanation that jibes with the essentials of Buddhist teaching.

Apropos of the Big Bang, I remind him that this ironic expression, coined by astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, who was opposed to it, is based on an idea formulateed by a Belgian priest, Fr. Gearges-Henri Lemaitre. Even in scientific theories often enough it's possible to find a trace of 'hidden metaphysics.' The idea of an 'explosion,' of a brutal, luminous beginning of the world, can in fact be harmonized with the biblical account of Creation." -The Dalai Lama with Jean-Claude Carriere, Violence and Compassion: Dialogues on Life Today, 191.

I have a bunch of excellent passages that I want to record for future reference. No synthesis, sorry. They're just excellent to read through. First, Sylvia Boorstein, Pay Attention, For Goodness' Sake:

There are only two possible responses to every challenge--balanced acceptance or embittered resistance. Acceptance is freedom. Resistance is suffering.

"This is what's happening. It cannot be otherwise. Struggling is extra. Struggling is suffering."

     Everything is always changing, and so nothing can be permanently satisfying. And I absolutely know that railing and resenting when I am displeased with life's unfolding compounds my pain. Life unfolds lawfully, guided by conditions far too complex for me to know and certainly beyond my control.
     The pain we feel about what has happened intensifies with bitterness--which we often cannot help but feel--and we suffer. In a moment of Wisdom--"It is me. It is now. It is painful. And it will be painful for as long as it is, and then it will change"--the suffering stops. The heart's natural compassion becomes available to provide support, to comfort the pain.

Recounted from a friend, talking about his teacher, who greeted everyone with "Thank you":
"Renouncing contention was Lama Yeshe's practice. His thanking was a way of keeping himself from getting frightened. I completely got it, that things happen, that not everything is what you want, that some things you need to change, but that it's all part of life, and that it is manageable. Workable."

However amazing life is, it is full of pain. ... [N]ot resenting, not being in contention with circumstance, not adding extra suffering to pain, doesn't require all-out thanking. It only requires accepting. It requires being able to say, "This is what's true. Okay."

Forgiving is hard practice, too, but it's plausible. Reasonable.

Don't add rage to pain.

"What is the meaning of life?" does not solve the problem of "What should we do?" ... Ending suffering depends on seeing clearly, without bias, "It's like this," so the "What should we do?" question can answer itself.
Life is so difficult
How can we be anything but kind?

That's enough for now. I have more that I need to copy out of my current book, so I'm sure there will be at least one more entry on suffering.

This is from Sylvia Boorstein's Pay Attention, for Goodness' Sake. She recounts a conversation she had with a Muslim cab driver about prayer. This bit picks up after she asked him who often and for how long he prayed:

"Well, it could take a long time or short. If you have a short time, you can do it in a short time. Probably longer is better... You know,m it really doesn't matter how long you pray. Some people stand and pray all day but it doesn't really count because it's not connected to their heart."

"Really? How do you connect it to your heart?"

"Well, you can't just decide. It gets connected to your heart when you know what the situation here is. It's like we've all been thrown in the middle of the ocean. Nobody knows how to swim. We're all drowning. It breaks your heart. You see that, then you connect."

That is what I'd get tattooed, on the inside of my left wrist, above my mala bracelet. A permanent reminder of the following, inspired by the section on the paramita (perfection of the heart) lovingkindness, from Sylvia Boorstein's Pay Attention, For Goodness' Sake:

1. Always tell good stories about people to other people. Provide everyone with as much opportunity for love and harmony as possible by providing a good ground for people to love and be loved.

2. Always tell good stories about people to yourself. Ruminating on old wounds or insults causes the hurt to rot. We're all just trying to do the best we can, and we all mess up. Be forgiving of others, and be kind to yourself in letting the hurt go. Holding onto hurt is not a strength, it is a self-inflicted and chronic weakness. Forgiveness and love are the only things that can make you whole again.

3. Always tell good stories about yourself to yourself. Be kind to yourself. Allow yourself to grow. Be gently mindful of who you are and what you do. Be forgiving and supportive of yourself when you need to make adjustments. Recognize and nurture the good in you and what you do.


It is this way that we must train ourselves:
by liberation of the self through love
we will develop love,
we will practice it,
we will make it both a way and a basis,
take a stand upon it,
store it up,
and thoroughly set it going.

-The Buddha

Heavy title, right? :) I'm going to type up a few passages from the Dalai Lama's The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus that illuminate my spiritual attraction to Buddhism and how it jibes with my Christian, specifically Mormon, beliefs.

First, a personal anecdote to show you where I've come from. NOTE: These are my impressions, thoughts, and what I've personally learned. If they do not match your experience or understanding exactly, that's to be expected: no one is the same, no one has had the same experiences, and no one understands everything in the exact same way. So it makes sense that God would reveal Himself and communicate with us differently. I will try not to be disrespectful in any way, so as to avoid causing offense or grief. God is a personal experience for us all. I want to share some of what has expanded my understanding of and relationship with God.

God the Power
I grew up believing, for whatever reason, whether it was my own obtuseness or the misinterpretation of my classes or teachers, or whatever--I grew up thinking of God as some guy (well, two guys, Heavenly Father and Jesus) who were somehow more than mortal, floating up in space somewhere, who created the universe and were watching us very carefully to keep track of our good and bad deeds so that they (undercapitalized on purpose) could send the appropriate and respective blessings and punishments. Somehow, although they are physical beings, they can be everywhere and in everything all at once.

I've been on a very intense scripture study for the last few months, keeping notes, asking questions, investigating my beliefs and religion. I've learned a lot.

One of the most enlightening and exciting developments has been that I developed this idea, through study, prayer, and honest, thorough thought, that God is a power. God is the power of everything that is. God is truth. God is reality. So God is in everything. You can point to anything, and that's God. Heat. Gravity. Light. Sound. Love. Compassion. As it says in Doctrine and Covenants 88:6-13:

If you, in reading this, feel it is too "hippie-dippie" for your sensibilities, that's fine. But at least seriously stop and think how different the world would be if people actually were at peace and loved each other. If there were more unity and less judging, fighting, and isolation.

I feel, in a very personal and urgent and growing way, that there is a great need for love and unity everywhere: in my own life, how I handle interactions with myself and others; in interactions between people; between governments and their people, as well as between the people in government, and between those who support different movements or ideas in government; between nations; between different faiths and religious traditions, as well as between people in the same faith or religion; between different nationalities, ethnicities, social classes, sexual orientations; between people with different ideologies, aspirations, and goals... Everywhere.

How Lovingkindness Works to Re-wire Your Brain
I've been incorporating lovingkindness in my daily meditation. The idea is that you start by offering lovingkindness to yourself and wishing yourself well, then you offer lovingkindness to others and wish them well, then you offer lovingkindness to all beings and wish them well. It's really quite beautiful: if you wish to see more peace and love in the world, you have to become peace and love yourself. Then already the world has more peace and love. (For more thorough and eloquent treatment, check out Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace.) Then you spread the love and peace to others through cultivating lovingkindness in meditation, which increases the capacity in that part of your brain so that you actually re-wire your brain so that you see and act more in accordance with the good intentions, thoughts, and feelings you meditate on. Your interactions with and intentions towards others change. (Do a bit of Googling on how meditation can re-wire your brain; it's scientifically sound. And amazing. Basically, where you focus the most, your brain grows. So, if you focus on angry stuff, the amygdala, the anger center of your brain, will actually grow, making anger more prevalent in your life. So, really, your thoughts do end up controlling your destiny. Thanks, Lao Tzu and/or Ghandi.)

The Meditation
So, I've been doing lovingkindness meditation, again, where you start with yourself, move to others, and move to all beings. My current mantra has been roughly this, varying a bit based on what I'd like to focus on that day:

May I be happy.
May I be safe and protected.
May I be at peace.
May I be free from suffering.*
May I be loved and be love.*

May you be happy.
May you be safe and protected.
May you be at peace.
May you be free from suffering.
May you be loved and be love.

May all beings be happy.
May all beings be safe and protected.
May all beings be at peace.
May all beings be free from suffering.
May all beings be loved and be love.

*suffering: I use it in the sense of any kind of stress or pain, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, psychological, etc.
*be loved and be love: Everyone has the right to be loved. I like the poetic twist of being both the receptacle and the sender of love. If everyone were loved and love, the world would be ruled by perfect love. God, however you personally see or know God, would be everywhere.

When I really nail it, when I focus on what I'm saying and what it means and the reality that would go with it, it is an incredible spiritual experience. God is there when I'm doing this right.

Applied Action
As I was doing my meditation today, I was focusing my "may you" section on one particular person. It felt so good to focus on their suffering being gone, their happiness full, on them being loved and being love. This person has gone through a lot of pretty terrible things and has suffered a lot. I felt God with me as I wished them happy and well.

But then I thought, "Ok, this is great. I'm developing my brain in positive ways, coming closer to God, and cultivating love and compassion for this person. And then what? I'll end my meditation, get up, think well on this person and wish them well. Cool. But naturally and without question, there also needs to be a concrete course of action on my part to help realize all these things for this person."

So here's what I've come up with so far, what I can do to help make my meditation a reality. It applies to specific people you meditate on, as well as "all beings." So, really, this stuff should be applied to absolutely everyone, although for simplicity's sake, I write from the angle of applying it to one particular person:

-May you be happy: In my interactions with this person, I must make sure to keep their welfare forefront in my mind and say and do things that will uplift and nurture them, so as to provide the positive space for their happiness to develop. I must avoid saying or doing things, to the best of my ability, that would cause them to experience distress or unhappiness.

-May you be safe and protected: I need to make sure this person is safe and protected with me, both in my physical presence as well as in my thoughts and conversation. I must not do or say things that would put them at risk, even something as simple and yet profoundly damaging as speaking poorly of them to myself or to others.

-May you be at peace and May you be free from suffering: Again, I must be mindful in my interactions with and about this person, so that I do not destroy their peace or add to their suffering. I must be mindful so that I am aware of anything I personally can/should do (or should not do) to help secure their peace and lessen their suffering.

-May you be loved and be love: Everyone, regardless of their actions, has the absolute right to be loved. In the general sense, I must not deny or hinder or begrudge any being this right. In particular, I must be aware of and take every opportunity to show and express my love for this person, in thought, word, or deed. I must always remember that this person is and/or can be a powerful force for increasing love in the world, so my love for them is triply precious: 1. My love for them helps me grow; 2. My love for them helps them grow; 3. Their love helps the other beings grow.

Pure Heart and Real Intent
Of course, you can't control how other will react to you or your efforts, even if your intents are of the very best. But you do absolutely have to make sure that what you're doing is the best you can do, with your heart pure and with the right intentions. We are responsible for caring for each other. Being mindful of the Eightfold Path will be invaluable. I'll do a post on it soon, but for now, a bit about Right Speech will work as an example of a good guideline in interacting with and about others, with a view for increasing love and unity in ourselves and in the world:

1. Do I speak at the right time, or not?
2. Do I speak of facts, or not?
3. Do I speak gently or harshly?
4. Do I speak profitable words or not?
5. Do I speak with a kind heart, or inwardly malicious?

Or, THINK:
Is it:
True?
Helpful?
Inspiring?
Necessary?
Kind?

Drawing on religious faith to promote basic human values is something very positive. The major world religions all teach love, compassion, and forgiveness. The way each religious tradition promotes there is different, of course, but since they aim at more or less the same goals--having a happier life, becoming a more compassionate person, and creating a more compassionate world--their different methods do not present an inherent problem. The ultimate achievement of love, compassion, and forgiveness is what is important. All the major world religions have the same potential to help humanity. Some people have a disposition suited to religious faith, and because of the variety of dispositions among humans, it logically follows that we need different religions. The variety is beneficial.
-Tenzig Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, The Compassionate Life, 47-48

[A]s there is a difference in the degree of receptivity on the part of individual sentient beings, spiritual growth will also differ from individual to individual. ... [T]here is a diversity of mental dispositions and receptivity, interests, and spiritual inclinations existing among humanity. ... All these various teachings [he's talking about different teachings in Buddhism, I used snippets that will work for different religions in general] are aimed toward sentient beings' diverse mental dispositions, needs, and spiritual inclinations.
...
Therefore, it is crucial that religious teachers teach according to the receptivity, the spiritual inclination, and the mental disposition of each person. One cannot eat a particular food and then say, "Because it is nutritious for me, everyone must eat it"; each person must eat foods that are suitable for the best physical health according to his or her own physical constitution. One must maintain a diet that is most suited to one's individual health because the very purpose of eating food is to seek bodily nourishment. It would be stupid or foolish for someone to insist upon eating a specific dish, when it is not suitable or may be harmful, merely because it is highly prized or the most expensive.

Similarly, religion is like nourishment for your spirit and your mind. When embarking upon a spiritual path, it is important that you engage in a practice that is most suited to your mental development, your dispositions, and your spiritual inclinations. It is crucial that each individual seek a form of spiritual practice and belief that is most effective for that individual's specific needs. Through this, one can bring about inner transformation, the inner tranquility that will make that individual spiritually mature and a warm-hearted, whole, and good and kind person. That is the consideration one must use in seeking spiritual nourishment.
-Tenzig Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus, page 72 and 74.

I love these passages. I've had this conviction since middle school, when I thought about all the many different religions in the world. It's beautiful to see it so wonderfully communicate in someone else's words.

In joining or evaluating your existing membership in your religion, I think the point is to be honest with yourself. You need to be where you feel God. You need to do what brings you closer to God. It's not the label that matters...it's the person you become.

"Faith is not logical certainty. With logic there it no personal freedom. The mind must impose the truth of a logical statement. But with faith, the deeper levels of truth call forth a personal response that we are eternally free to give or to retain. If, with your rational mind, you see that ten divided by five equals two, you are not really free to believe it or not. To deny it is absurd. If, however, with the eyes of faith, you realize that you are in love, then you are confronted with the vast space of human freedom in which that truth can be lived or denied, accepted or evaded."

-page 29-30 of the introduction to the Dalai Lama's The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus. The intro was written by Laurence Freeman, OSB.

"Insight is an experience of the truth that cannot be simply given to another person in the way that one may communicate ideas or beliefs/ Insight is spontaneous and has the nature of a gift. It is surprising when it comes and yet obvious. It is joyful yet calm. The mastic tradition practices a form of spiritual reading (lecto divina as Saint Benedict called it), which is not the same as study or analytic reading and which is dedicated to the progressive awakening of insight in the practitioner. Like the Jewish tradition of reading the Bible, quality is preferred to quantity, depth to breadth. Reading in this way, one chooses a short passage and then continues to ruminate or "chew" over it. You go back over it many times, homing in more and more until you are left with a single word or short phrase, simultaneously arresting and awakening the mind to meaning. In this way, as the mind is stilled, one is brought to the threshold of meditation.

How to Read the Word

Origen, a third-century Christian teacher in the Alexandrian school of Christian philosophy, was the first to systematically describe the art of reading and interpreting Scripture as well as the first to describe how the mind's encounter with the Scriptures lifts the mind above itself. He identified the different levels of meaning (an exercise that was anathema to fundamentalists then as it is now) waiting to be experienced in the Scriptures.

He saw the reading of Holy Scriptures as a process of deepening consciousness and insight. The process begins with the literal meaning of the text, a meaning that requires both a sense of grammar and of history. But, beyond the "letter that killeth," which goes no further than its surface meaning, Origen pushed on toward the level of moral meaning. This level is reached by seeing the stories and characters of Scripture as "types" or symbols that teach us lessons within the context of our personal or social circumstances. The, Origen said, the "allegorical" or mystical meaning waits to be discovered as we are lifted above ourselves and absorbed into the Logos itself [Logos is the Spirit of Christ]. A good example of how this process works can be seen by exploring the different levels of meaning in the Bible term "Jerusalem": the word, the place, and the symbol. Jerusalem has a literal historical meaning. As the center of sacred presence and worship for three religions, it symbolizes the spiritual realities of the pilgrimage of our lives. As the "heavenly Jerusalem" it represents the goal of the spiritual journey."

-page 26-27 of the introduction to the Dalai Lama's The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus. The intro was written by Laurence Freeman, OSB.

"What is so powerful about this ideal of friendship is the way it can reconcile the absolute and the personal. You can disagree about the choice of carpet color and remain friends. A Buddhist can be friends with a Christian without either trying to convert the other. In friendship differences can be respected and even enjoyed. In relationships lacking friendship, differences can zoom out of proportion and become ethnic, religious, or ideological divisions. We demonize the threatening other, project our shadow upon them, and find conflict. Friendship is the supreme expression of compassion and tolerance with respect for the primacy of truth over all subjective tendencies. But friendship reminds us that the objectivity of truth does not reject the subjective. It integrates the particular and the universal, achieving the coincidentia oppositorum, the reconciliation of opposites. Nicholas of Cusa, a fifteenth-century cardinal, statesman, mathematician, and mystic, said that God is found "beyond the coincidence of contradictories."

There is a simple test to determine whether one's pursuit of truth has lost contact with this touchstone of friendship. When we hear on the news that a Catholic person has been shot in Belfast, or an Israeli soldier has died on the West Bank, or so many Chinese baby girls have disappeared from an orphanage, or so many Tibetans have been killed--are we hearing a news item about individual people, or about ehtnic or religious groups? Do we perceive the murdered Israeli soldier or Palestinian demonstrator as a Jew or an Arab, or as a human being who happens to be a Jew or an Arab? How do the figures strike us--as individual tragedies or as statistics that are being used as political weapons?"

-page 9 of the introduction to The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus, by The Dalai Lama

"You may not feel that anger is a hindrance, so, as a start, it is useful to investigate whether anger is of value. Sometimes, when we are discouraged by a difficult situation, anger does seem helpful, appearing to bring with it more energy, confidence, and determination. In these moments, though, we much examine our mental state carefully. While it is true that anger brings extra energy, if we explore the nature of this energy, we discover that it is blind. We cannot be sure whether its result will be positive or negative. This is because anger eclipses the best part of our brain: its rationality. So the energy of anger is almost always unreliable. It can cause an immense amount of destructive, unfortunate behavior. Moreover, if anger increases to the extreme, one becomes a crazy person, acting in ways that are as damaging to oneself as they are to others.

It is possible, however, to develop an equally forceful but far more controlled energy with which to handle difficult situations. This controlled energy comes not only from a compassionate attitude, but also from reason and patience. These are the most powerful antidotes to anger. Unfortunately, many people misjudge reason and patience as signs of weakness. I believe the opposite to be true: that they are the true signs of inner strength. Compassion is by nature gently, peaceful, and soft, but it is also very powerful. It gives us inner strength and allows us to be patient. It is those who easily lose their patience who are insecure and unstable. Thus, to me, the arousal of anger is usually a direct sign of weakness.

So, when a problem arises, try to remain humble and maintain a sincere attitude and be concerned that the outcome will be fair. Of course, others may try to take advantage of your concern for fairness, and if your remaining detached only encourages unjust aggression, adopt a strong stand. This should be done with compassion, however, and if it becomes necessary to express your views and take strong countermeasures, do so without anger or ill intent.

You should realize that even though your opponents appear to be harming you, in the end, their destructive activity will damage only themselves. In order to check your own selfish impulses to retaliate, you should recall your desire to practice compassion and assume responsibility for helping prevent the other person from suffering the consequences of their acts. If the measure you employ have been calmly chosen, they will be more effective, more accurate, and more forceful. Retaliation based on blind energy of anger seldom hits the target.

...

To eliminate the destructive potential of anger and hatred entirely, we need to recognize that the root of anger lies in the attitude that cherishes our own welfare and benefit while remaining oblivious to the well-being of others. This self-centered attitude underlies not only anger, but virtually all our states of mine. It is a deluded attitude, misperceiving the way things actually are, and this misperception is responsible for all the suffering and dissatisfaction of experience."

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, The Compassionate Life, pages 24-26 and 28-29.

This is a repost from another blog of mine (here and here). It's a pure copy/paste, but I've added subtitles to break up the sheer, intimidating length of it :)

Buddhist Philosophy on Arguing about Religious Notions