Audio Dharma and disembodied teachers

The web serves up the voice of almost any teacher currently actively teaching the Dharma in the world. The tradition, the location, or the venue don’t matter. You can download Dharma talks on any subject. You can work through a beginning meditation course, listen to teachings on afflictive emotions to help you with anger or lust or greed, or you can even download a step by step discussion of many great Buddhist texts like the Dhammapada or Dogen’s Shobogenzo. All of it is freely available in the spirit of sharing the Dharma. I often take this for granted, quickly browsing by topic for a talk on my “problem of the day.” But think about how incredible it is to be able to hear the voice of the Dalai Lama, or Robert Aitken, or Ajahn Brahm.

Here’s a list of my personal favorite resources for audio Dharma, in no particular order.

Zencast.org
Audio Dharma
BuddhaNet Audio
WZEN.org
Buddhist Geeks
Dhamma Talks
Audio teachings by Norman Fischer at Everyday Zen
Thubten Chodron’s audio library
MP3 talks at Dharma Punx by Noah Levine

There are many more out there. You don’t have to live near a teacher to find one that resonates with you. Thubten Chodron transformed my thinking on emotions, and I’ve never spoken to her personally. Jundo Cohen brought zazen alive for me and generously gave me the precepts, but I’ve never shaken his hand.

Brad Warner recently wrote a post over at Hardcore Zen about Treeleaf Zendo and how online interaction is not the same as real life face to face contact with a teacher. I agree that it’s not the same. However, there seems to be an implied judgment there that “not the same” equals “not as good.” I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Both have benefits and drawbacks. Face to face time with a teacher, for someone who doesn’t have a sangha close by, might mean sacrificing time with a family or other responsibilities. However, online interaction doesn’t provide the “smell of the person, the shared physical space, that little bit of electrochemical interconnectedness that occurs when you’re near a person” as Brad puts it.

So what are the benefits of online communication with a teacher?
- Regular access, no matter where you are.
- Expanded access to much more information and many more teachings than would be available in person.
- Your choice of teacher, instead of just the teacher who’s closest to you geographically.
- Communication is recorded and saved (via video and forums) so the teacher is held responsible for his or her words.

I don’t think one is better than the other. I see the benefits of both, and I even see the benefits of combining both. Web is Dharma, though. Dharma doesn’t just exist “out there” in the real world. Dharma is here on the screen and in your practice and in interacting with others, whether it’s online or in the “real” world or floating out there in space somewhere. Don’t let anything make you judge your practice as “not good enough,” whatever it is. Your practice is what it is in this moment. It couldn’t be anything else. Just keep listening for the Dharma.

Online Dharma opportunity: The Five Hindrances

Audiodharma has added another course to their online meditation curriculum. Ines Freedman and Gil Fronsdal will lead a course on the Five Hindrances starting on May 31. The only prerequisite is that you’ve already completed their Intro to Insight Meditation course with teacher support.

These courses, provided on the basis of dana only, are an amazing wealth of practice support and in depth study. Having a weekly chat with a meditation instructor is a great way to keep your practice going steady through those hot summer months (sloth and torpor, anyone?).

So what are the Five Hindrances, anyway? Sounds like a real downer, right? Yeah, pretty much. The Five Hindrances are those big bad monsters that are likely to keep you frustrated in meditation and that lead you away from enlightenment. Drum roll, please…

1. Sensual desire (kāmacchanda): Craving for pleasure to the senses.
2. Anger or ill-will (byāpāda, vyāpāda): Feelings of malice directed toward others.
3. Sloth-torpor or boredom (thīna-middha): Half-hearted action with little or no concentration.
4. Restlessness-worry (uddhacca-kukkucca): The inability to calm the mind.
5. Doubt (vicikicchā): Lack of conviction or trust.

Source: Wikipedia

As you can imagine, these forces can cause a major motivation suck in plenty of other areas in life besides meditation. I’m hoping this course will touch on when to accept and when to fight back against these hindrances. Coming from a Zen background of goalless goal sitting, sometimes it’s hard to know when to actively suck it up and push back.

If you’ve already taken the Intro course, click here to register. If you just want to audit the course, click here.

World’s first online Jukai completed

First of all, welcome to those of you who are visiting from the post mentioning Dharmacore on the Tricycle Editor’s Blog. I’m glad to have you here.

So it was a long process leading up to our online Jukai, but for those of us who participated, it was very rewarding. The ceremony was held on 1/17/09 at 9am CST, and people from all over and country (and the world!) participated. It lasted about an hour, and we followed the traditional Soto Zen precept ceremony.

You can see exactly how we did it. First, Jundo created a very helpful PDF Jukai guide for everyone to print out and follow along with during the ceremony. Then we were each assigned a spot in a video conference meeting room using MeBeam. MeBeam didn’t actually work that well for me; I kept getting kicked off every five minutes or so, but it seemed to work well for several of the other attendees. Jundo broadcasted himself and his end of the ceremony using Ustream.

The ceremony involved a lot of chanting and bowing, as well as reciting the Heart Sutra, a very important text in Zen Buddhism. We “received” our hand-sewn rakusus from Jundo, complete with the lovely calligraphy panel sewn in the back. The calligraphy includes our new Buddhist names chosen for each of us by Jundo, the date of the ceremony, and several stamps representing Jundo and our lineage. He also included a beautiful lineage paper that shows our new name flowing down from all the past Buddhas and ancestors.

Here are some photos:

The first photo shows the lineage paper and the name calligraphy (I had these framed), and the other two photos are of me and the altar setup I used during the ceremony.

If you would like to watch the recorded ceremony, you can see the whole thing here: Jundo’s online Jukai recording.

My Buddhist name is Shinkai, which means “ocean of fidelity.” Taking the precepts (and this name) meant a lot to me. I’ve been exploring Buddhism for over 3 years now, and the timing was exactly right for me to make this commitment. I thank Jundo and all my fellow online sangha members who participated in our trailblazing online Jukai.

Co-opting the Dharma

The Worst Horse, one of the best Buddhist blogs on the web, keeps track of a little thing they like to call “Dharma burgers.” These are delicious morsels of marketing hooha that use pseudo-Buddhist concepts (meditation! tranquility! om!) to sell things.

Being in marketing myself, I tend to be less offended and more amused by these attempts. Today, the Horse has a great about South Park, Goth/vamp kids, and co-opting the Dharma. I highly suggest you check it out.

A quick excerpt:

If you’re not sure what this has to do with Buddhism and the kind of ground that the Horse is trying to till, ask yourself: “Am I a Goth or a Vampire?” You’re likely neither in actuality. But go ahead and transpose yourself into “The Ungroundable”’s equation: Are you really into Buddhism and what it teaches, or are you, as the kids like to say, a poseur?

The Horse goes on to assure us that we’re not posers. The problem is, no amount of assurance will ever convince us that deep down we’re not just fooling others into liking an image of who we’d like to be. Deep down, the condition of being human keeps us from truly accepting what we are, exactly as we are.

Acceptance is a major aspect of Buddhist practice. Not just acceptance of the things we like about ourselves, but acceptance of every dark nuance of our personality. If you’re a vampire Hot Topic poser, accept you’re a vampire Hot Topic poser. The point isn’t to become something more authentic. It’s to realize your own inherent authenticity. That’s the real work.

The Anatomy of an Online Jukai Ceremony

Jukai just got digital. Jundo Cohen of Treeleaf Zendo is trailblazing in the art of online Dharma.

What is Jukai? This is an ancient Zen ceremony where a Buddhist student receives the precepts and takes refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. It usually involves sewing a rakusu, a traditional Zen garment that my non-Buddhist friends have lovingly taken to calling a “Buddha bib,” and getting a Buddhist name from the teacher. It has that satisfying gravitas we’re all looking for in a religious ceremony.

Jundo Cohen, ordained in the Soto Zen tradition under Zen Master Gudo Wafu Nishijima, created Treeleaf Zendo over 2 years ago and brought interested practitioners a serious online sangha experience. Complete with samu (work practice), sanzen (video chat meetings with the teacher) and a forum for communication among members, the sangha has grown steadily. Now, a small group of us have joined Jundo in his latest experiment of an online Jukai ceremony.

Not that calling it an “experiment” should in any way imply that Jundo or his students aren’t taking the requirements seriously. Over several months, Jukai hopefuls are studying a wide selection of readings, primarily guided by Robert Aiken’s The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics and also including essays from many other Zen teachers. Participants are even sewing the rakusu, guided by a very detailed set of instructional sewing videos with Rev. Taigu created especially for this unique online ceremony.

So how exactly did Jundo do it?

Tech:
- Skype for direct video communication
- Treeleaf video zendo for group meditation and retreats
- Google Video for the rakusu sewing instructions
- Treeleaf forums for precepts study

Other materials:
- Various sewing materials (fabric, thread, etc.)
- Robert Aiken’s The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics
- Various online readings
- The good ol’ meditation cushion

Loose schedule:
- Prep period of gathering materials, ordering the book
- General discussion of Jukai and the Three Refuges
- Week by week study of the 10 precepts (not to kill, lie, steal, self-aggrandize, defame others, misuse sex, misuse intoxicants, become wrongfully angered, to be generous, and to honor awareness, learning and community) with metta “intermission” week
- Simultaneous sewing of the rakusu while studying the precepts
- Weekend Rohatsu retreat (Dec. 6-7)
- Online Jukai with Jundo

We’re still not sure how the live online Jukai is going to work out, but that’s part of the beauty of it. The expansion of online Dharma proves again and again that you can seek out and learn from the teaching that best benefits you, not just the teaching next door.

Zen Buddhist Gathas

If I were to ask non-Buddhists to read one Buddhist book, it probably wouldn’t big one of the big sweeping volumes about the history of the religion, and it definitely wouldn’t be the new agey self help from the Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Hanh. It wouldn’t even be the punk-to-monk semi-autobiographies by Brad Warner or Noah Levine, even though those are some of my favorites. It would probably be The Dragon Who Never Sleeps by Robert Aitken. It’s a slim, rarely-mentioned and highly underrated collection of Zen Buddhist gathas. Gathas are little poems (in Aitken’s format, the second line is always “I vow with all beings”) that illustrate some of the best moments for practice in our lives.

Here are some of my favorites:

When someone offers a drink
I vow with all beings
to acknowledge the sorrow it causes
as it warms and gladdens our hearts.

When the outcome proves disappointing
I vow with all beings
to look again at my purpose-
was it Dharma or something else?

When I panic at losing my bearings
I vow with all beings
to acknowledge the error is panic,
not losing familiar ground.

When my efforts are clearly outclassed
I vow with all beings
to face my own limitations
and bring forth my original self.

Looking up at the sky
I vow with all beings
to remember this infinite ceiling
in every room of my life.

When a car goes by late at night
I vow with all beings
to remember the lonely bakers
who secretly nourish us all.

When a train rattles by at the crossing
I vow with all beings
to remember my mother and father
and imagine their thoughts in the night.

If you practice with gathas, please share some in the comments.

The anatomy of an online meditation course

This week, two excellent Insight Meditation teachers kicked off a 6-week Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation Course (that I mentioned in a previous post). What’s special about that, you say? Well, this meditation course takes place entirely online.

Meditation instruction online? Web-based Dharma teachings? Right up my (and probably your) alley. Now that I’ve almost completed Week One of the course and had my first online meeting with my meditation instructor, I thought it would be interesting to profile the tools that Gil Fronsdal and Ines Freedman (along with a host of other assistant teachers they brought on due to the popularity of the course) are using to bring this course to the web.

Site: Google Sites
The teachers have set up a website specifically for the course. Though (almost) all of the information on the site is communicated via email, this provides a nice repository for students to refer back to during the course.

Group communication: Google Groups
All of the communication from the teachers comes via email from a Google account set up specifically for the course. Students were invited to join the Google group as soon as they registered for the course.

Scheduling: Jiffle
This is the one tool I hadn’t heard of before I took this course. Jiffle allows others to schedule themselves for appointment times on your calendar (if you approve the request). Students were required to reserve a time each week on their instructor’s Jiffle calendar for their one on one meeting.

One to one communication: Phone, IM, Skype, and email
Course participants have a lot of flexibility in the way they choose to communicate with their meditation instructors. We had our choice of regular phone (we call our instructor or our instructor calls us), various IM clients (Y! Messenger, AIM, Google Talk), Skype voice and/or text chat, or just plain old emails. No matter what you choose, you get guaranteed weekly live one on one time with your meditation instructor.

The instructors have artfully combined all of these tools to create a seamless practice environment where communication is quick, scheduled, and personal. The instructors are available to answer questions, and practice issues that are relevant to the entire group can easily be shared with everyone. So far, this is a great experience and a flagship example of buddhism for the web generation.

Vassa: The fun of Lent for Buddhists!

So today is Dhamma Day (also called Asalha Puja), which marks the anniversary of the Buddha’s first sermon at Deer Park. Tomorrow marks the beginning of Vassa, the three-month rains retreat historically observed by monks in Theravada Buddhist countries.

This will be my third observation of Vassa. Traditionally, Vassa means extra practice, extra precepts, and not leaving the monastic environment. So how does Vassa become a modern practice in the US for the lay practitioner? I don’t claim to know, exactly, how Vassa translates to Western Buddhist practice. I observe it by giving up drinking alcohol entirely (I normally just try to follow the rule of not taking intoxicants to the point of heedlessness). I strive to follow the Five Precepts, which are as follows:

1. Panatipata veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami
I undertake the precept to refrain from destroying living creatures.
2. Adinnadana veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami
I undertake the precept to refrain from taking that which is not given.
3. Kamesu micchacara veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami
I undertake the precept to refrain from sexual misconduct.
4. Musavada veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami
I undertake the precept to refrain from incorrect speech.
5. Suramerayamajja pamadatthana veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami
I undertake the precept to refrain from intoxicating drinks and drugs which lead to carelessness.

Source: Access to Insight

I also re-devote myself to home meditation practice, download and listen to tons of Dharma talks from places like Audio Dharma, and generally try to be less of an asshole.

You can read an interesting article on Vassa to learn more about the history of this observance. Access to Insight also has a fantastic lay resource called Lay Buddhist Practice by Bhikkhu Khantipalo which has an excellent section on the rains retreat. If you practice Vassa observance, I’d love to hear about your methods in the comments.

The rules of living

There are a lot of rules in the Pali Canon – 227 major rules for bhikkhus and 311 major rules for bhikkhunis, to be exact. I mean, let’s all face it, that’s a hell of a lot of rules. Modern Buddhism isn’t too big on rules. Most focus on the 5 precepts and the noble 8-fold path, at most. Americans like basics and bullet points, apparently. I know I do, as long as it isn’t on a Powerpoint slide.

A lot of newbie Dharma revolves around ways to incorporate the rules of Buddhist living into your everyday life. It’s very inspiring to read stories of austere monasteries and virtuous monks, but once you get on the highway or talk to your mother-in-law, you’re an asshole again. This can lead to a dangerously delusional interpretation of how to practice with Buddhist morality. It’s all the time, every day, not just on the cushion or during Dharma talks. That doesn’t mean you’re a perfect person every second of the day, though. It just means being aware of your intentions, and every time that awareness gives you pause, when it gives you a choice instead of a gut reaction, you make the decision that’s in line with the Dharma. You make the decision that doesn’t harm, delude, or obfuscate.

So what are some ways that you can bring this newbie friendly awareness into your life? What are Dharmacore values on a radically mundane level? All I can speak to are the ways I’ve created my own traditions based on those ancient rules.

Daily:
Waking – know your intention for the day. Begin with the wish not to harm others in any way.
Eating – moderation, and gratefulness.
Speaking – does it need to be said? is it hurtful? is it truthful? is it helpful? is it necessary?
Consuming – what am I watching? what am I reading? how is it affecting me?
Contributing – how have I helped my wife today? have I missed an opportunity to help a stranger?
Participating – Buddhist communities and forums online, plus this blog.

Long term:
Vassa observance – Starting in July, this will be my 3rd Vassa. No alcohol during this time, less TV, more Dharma books and audio talks
Uposatha observance – Rice and milk for breakfast, signifying the Buddha’s symbolic meal. Precepts, no alcohol.
Classes – Local and online classes whenever possible.

These are a few really simple, really personal interpretations of some Buddhist traditions. As you can tell, they’re not strictly denominational or strictly anything. They’re just ways that I remind myself of what it is I’m doing.

How do you remind yourself of your practice?

Family values, Dharma style

Often in modern Western life, our families and friends are our sanghas. Buddhism has fallen dramatically short at creating family-friendly fellowship among its practitioners. For all the emphasis on the sangha (a group of people who support your practice) in the original teachings, traditional Buddhism has been less than inclusive of family life, at times even outright discriminating against women, children, and family concerns. In her article, Change or Die: American Buddhism When Baby-Boomer Converts Are Gone, Andrea Useem talks about Zen monk Clark Strand’s recent article in Tricyle, “Dharma Family Values.”

Clark asserts that while Buddhism has made a good start in the US and has become part of the lexicon (a subject I’m interested in myself), we haven’t yet figured out how to “get married and buried” as Buddhists. Ritual, family, and ceremony have either been stripped away completely in the name of creating a more agnostic Buddhism or they’ve been copied verbatim, preserved in the form in which they were imported but not adapted to our own modern lives.

This is one of the most important places Buddhism can learn from Christianity (yes, we should be mindfully paying attention!). Christians have summer camps, youth groups, Bible studies, pot lucks, and fellowship after services. Now, I know that many local Buddhist groups often have gatherings and work very hard to be family-friendly. However, I think that overall, Western Buddhism has failed to put together a cohesive system.

I got married yesterday. When trying to research how to have a “Buddhist” wedding, I came up with almost nothing. The choices are either ultra-traditional (robes, precepts, blessing by a monk) or vaguely New Age stuff that was made up by wedding portal websites to target a demographic. Where is the in between where we, as Westerners, often rest so comfortably?

The good and bad news is that we are creating the in between, the new traditions, here and now. Really, it’s a call to action for young Western Buddhists to be mindful of their own actions and take an active role in developing what Buddhism will be in this country. I didn’t have a “Buddhist” wedding ceremony. But I did vow to treat my partner with kindness, compassion and mindfulness, and I believe others in the post-boomer generations will uphold these and other Buddhist family values, no matter how they manifest in ritual and ceremony. A little bit of ceremony wouldn’t hurt, though.