Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

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zavk
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by zavk »

Wow, I'm glad to see all these responses--all of them great. I've been meaning to post my own, and I have a few. But will do it later, gotta rush now.

Metta,
zavk
With metta,
zavk
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phil
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by phil »

I love this song's message - the whole Magnolia films was very Dhammish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn7F75stXxI" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

metta,

phil
Kammalakkhano , bhikkhave, bālo, kammalakkhano pandito, apadānasobhanī paññāti
(The fool is characterized by his/her actions/the wise one is characterized by his/her actions/Wisdom shines forth in behaviour.)
(AN 3.2 Lakkhana Sutta)
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Dhammanando
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by Dhammanando »

  • Examination at the Womb-Door

    Who owns those scrawny little feet? Death.
    Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death.
    Who owns these still-working lungs? Death.
    Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death.
    Who owns these unspeakable guts? Death.
    Who owns these questionable brains? Death.
    All this messy blood? Death.
    These minimum-efficiency eyes? Death.
    This wicked little tongue? Death.
    This occasional wakefulness? Death.

    Given, stolen, or held pending trial?
    Held.

    Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death.
    Who owns all of space? Death.

    Who is stronger than hope? Death.
    Who is stronger than the will? Death.
    Stronger than love? Death.
    Stronger than life? Death.

    But who is stronger than Death?
    Me, evidently.
    Pass, Crow.

    — Ted Hughes
Rūpehi bhikkhave arūpā santatarā.
Arūpehi nirodho santataro ti.


“Bhikkhus, the formless is more peaceful than the form realms.
Cessation is more peaceful than the formless realms.”
(Santatarasutta, Iti 73)
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tiltbillings
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by tiltbillings »

THE SECOND COMING - Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
>> Do you see a man wise [enlightened/ariya] in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<< -- Proverbs 26:12

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723
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pink_trike
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by pink_trike »

tiltbillings wrote:THE SECOND COMING - Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
There are echos of something much more ancient than Buddhism in this.
Vision is Mind
Mind is Empty
Emptiness is Clear Light
Clear Light is Union
Union is Great Bliss

- Dawa Gyaltsen

---

Disclaimer: I'm a non-religious practitioner of Theravada, Mahayana/Vajrayana, and Tibetan Bon Dzogchen mind-training.
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cooran
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by cooran »

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -- by Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind --
---The trouble is that you think you have time---
---Worry is the Interest, paid in advance, on a debt you may never owe---
---It's not what happens to you in life that is important ~ it's what you do with it ---
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tiltbillings
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by tiltbillings »

>> Do you see a man wise [enlightened/ariya] in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<< -- Proverbs 26:12

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723
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tiltbillings
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by tiltbillings »

pink_trike wrote:
tiltbillings wrote:THE SECOND COMING - Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
There are echos of something much more ancient than Buddhism in this.
Oh, gawd, yes. It is a brilliant piece.
>> Do you see a man wise [enlightened/ariya] in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<< -- Proverbs 26:12

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723
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zavk
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by zavk »

Hi all,
A sign posted in a public restroom:

Keep Clean.

Heh.... I didn't think anyone would actually post something from a public restroom... nice.

I have a few; I'll post them in separate posts.

This one is a song by a band called The Earlies. I was reminded of this song when I read that statement by Nyanaponika Thera about wisdom being young and always within the reach of a mind that has reached its painful heights and has earned the chance to listen to it. The last stanza, for me, is a sober reminder of the cycle of samsara.

The Earlies - Wayward Song

Be still for me
Don't worry about everything you see
There's a time, a place
I could trace the years upon your face

Wayward son, you've lost your head again
Think of all the words you could've said
The road's not fit for a kid who ain't ready to see it yet
It's alright to let yourself down again tonight

Let go, release
Won't you help me set my mind at ease
There's a will, a way
I know it's getting dark now but it's okay

This time understand, that this lonely, tired bird don't know how to land

Wayward son, you've lost your head again
Think of all the words you could've said
The road's not fit for a kid who ain't ready to see it yet
It's alright to let yourself down again tonight

Hey there son, you've gotta carry on
Take a load off your weary head
The road's not fit for a kid who ain't ready to see it yet
It's alright to let yourself down again tonight

In this we life we love who we can
Then they're gone, then they're gone
But what will be and what has been
Will be again
With metta,
zavk
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zavk
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by zavk »

And speaking of public restroom. Someone once told me about what he saw. It reminds me of the extreme misreading of the Kalamasutta that we encounter from time to time.

Graffito 1: Think for yourself!

Graffito 2: Don't tell me what to do, a**hole!

:rofl:
With metta,
zavk
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zavk
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by zavk »

I was hesitant to post these ideas from French thinkers, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, because they sometimes arouse strong feelings of opposition in some people. They have been accused of being incoherent and being obscurantists. It doesn't help matters that all too often, Derridean and Foucauldian scholars have been unwilling to reply to criticisms, which then leads to further misunderstanding about their ideas. In any case, I am but learning about their work; so I can't say I've understood them well. Nor am I saying that their work have no flaws. But from what little I understand about them, they strike me as thinkers who have a deep commitment to ethics, and who are especially committed to interrogating the illusory 'self'. I think the following excerpts reflect this attitude. So FWIW:
Interview with Derrida:
Q.: Do you mean to say that you do not want to have any identity?
J.D.: On the contrary, I do, like everyone else. But by turning around this impossible thing, and which no doubt I also resist, the "I" constitutes the very form of resistance. Each time this identity announces itself, each time a belonging circumscribes me, if I may put it this way, someone or something cries: Look out for the trap, you're caught. Take off, get free, disengage yourself. Your engagement is elsewhere. Not very original, is it'?

Q.: Is the work you do aimed at refinding this identity?
J.D.: No doubt, but the gesture that tries to refind of itself distances, it distances itself again. One ought to be able to formalize the law of this insurmountable gap. This is a little what I am always doing. Identification is a difference to itself, a difference with/of itself. Thus with, without, and except itself. The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is at once a chance, a sign of life, and a wound. If it closed in on birth, on a plenitude of the utterance or the knowledge that says "I am born," that would be death.
Foucault responding to criticisms that he always changes his position:
'What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing--with a rather shaky hand--a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.'
With metta,
zavk
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cooran
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by cooran »

The words in the title of this picture - Painted in 1897 and 1898, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" addresses Paul Gauguin's struggle with the meaning of existence.

Image
---The trouble is that you think you have time---
---Worry is the Interest, paid in advance, on a debt you may never owe---
---It's not what happens to you in life that is important ~ it's what you do with it ---
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by pink_trike »

"To lapse into "explicate language" for a moment, the implicate order is much vaster than the explicate. It is like a great ocean reaching below the surface of the explicate. Although it is always possible to unfold some aspect of the implicate into the explicate, it is never possible to expose the whole of the implicate at any one time. While concepts of larger and smaller do not really apply at the level of the implicate order, one could perhaps say, loosely speaking, that the implicate order has the capacity to embrace and contain the explicate, but not vice versa. This means that what appear to be separate objects in our everyday world have arisen out of the same common ground and thus retain connections and attractions for each other, correlations that lie outside the normal range of explicate causality."

"...Bohm's notions are all about process, or the holomovement: that is, the movement of the whole. For Bohm, the ground (if we wish to call it that) or "all that is" takes the form of ceaseless movement. Within this movement can be discovered an endless process of unfolding and enfolding as the implicate order temporarily exposes aspects of itself to the explicate. The fact that our world appears stable is not so much that objects remain static in our world,but that the same patterns are constantly born again only to die away as fast as thought. Our minds and bodies encounter the surface of things, and of the apparent stability of the explicate, without being truly aware of the constant movement below."

---

quotes from F. David Peat's brilliant book:

From Certainty to Uncertainty: The Story of Science and Ideas in the Twentieth Century.
Vision is Mind
Mind is Empty
Emptiness is Clear Light
Clear Light is Union
Union is Great Bliss

- Dawa Gyaltsen

---

Disclaimer: I'm a non-religious practitioner of Theravada, Mahayana/Vajrayana, and Tibetan Bon Dzogchen mind-training.
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tiltbillings
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by tiltbillings »

"What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity
is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types-
biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the
pulp down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's
own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the
residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to
him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the
killer-bees attacking with a fury and a demonism, sharks continuing to
tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out-not to
mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in "natural" accidents
of all types: an earthquake buries alive seventy thousand bodies in Peru,
automobiles make a pyramid heap of over fifty thousand a year in the
U.S. alone, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the
Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a
planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the
blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make
about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three
billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer."
--Ernst Becker THE DENIAL OF DEATH
>> Do you see a man wise [enlightened/ariya] in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<< -- Proverbs 26:12

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723
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tiltbillings
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Re: Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

Post by tiltbillings »

The emergence of intelligence, I am convinced, tends to unbalance the ecology. In other words, intelligence is the great polluter. It is not until a creature begins to manage its environment that nature is thrown into disorder. Until that occurs, there is a system of checks and balances operating in a logical and understandable manner. Intelligence destroys and modifies the checks and balances even as it tries very diligently to leave them as they were. There is no such thing as an intelligence living harmony with the biosphere. It may think and boast it is doing so, but its mentality gives it an advantage and the compulsion is always there to employ this advantage to its selfish benefit. Thus, while intelligence may be an outstanding survival factor, the factor is short-term, and intelligence turns out to be the great destroyer. -- written by a crazy character in SHAKESPEARE'S PLANET, a sci-fi novel by Clifford Simak, 1976.
>> Do you see a man wise [enlightened/ariya] in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<< -- Proverbs 26:12

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723
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