Touring the Buddhoblogospehere

Time for a round of link sharing, and not of the golf variety, although there might be a bit of "putt, putt" along the way (see above).

First off, I added a bit of reflection to the posts I did a little while back on children and Buddhism. You can find the post, and an active discussion over at Buddhist Geeks.

Jaye over at Digital Zendo has an excellent post about the teacher/student relationship in Zen. I was especially moved by this paragraph:

It was at this point I had been feeling so powerless that a lot of anger was surfacing, In an email to me Genjo Osho wrote to me; “Sounds like a hard day in a difficult position. In regards to your temper, it is fully yours, no one else is responsible. I sometime lose my temper (thankfully much less than before!), but I know that when this happens there is usually some sane action that I am not taking. My temper is nearly always projected onto others, but really it arises from my own folly of not taking some action that in hindsight I should have taken. In other words, most often my temper flares when I fail to do something that in the moment is too hard to do.” He was seeing something, from a position that I could or would not see, not based on superiority but due to effort, experience, practice and unification with his own heart-mind. Since I was blinded by circumstances, he was seeing for me, since I could not and so that I would not only survive but live.

I'm really interested in investigating this "folly of not taking some action" comment more deeply.

Over at Alan Senauke's new blog, he is chronicaling the current hearing for Jarvis Masters, an African-American Buddhist and author who is on death row for a murder he probably didn't commit. Whether or not he's guilty, I firmly stand against the death penalty, and believe it is long past due time to abolish it's use once and for all.

At the trial, Alan observed:

all the principles in court, except for Jarvis (and one corrections officer there for security) are white. Mostly white men. Some on one side, some on the other. This includes all the police officers seen over the last two days. I draw no firm conclusions from this, aside from noting where power and authority appear to rest in the legal system and in this country as a whole.

The legacy of institutional racism in the U.S. "Justice" system is very long and awful, and so when seeing this kind of dynamic, it's very difficult not to think "here we go again."

Over at her new blog, Maia has a post about Maha Ghosananda (1929 – 2007), a Cambodian Buddhist who has been compared to Gandhi. Like the experiences I have been reading about in Chan Khong's book, the ways in which Maha Ghosananda worked with the great suffering of Cambodians during and after the Khmer Rouge period are totally inspiring and absolutely humbling.

Genju has a good post examining equanimity, which I think many of us mistakenly think means being calm, cool, and detached in all circumstances.

And finally, Algernon brings up the old what's flapping koan, which is always worth flapping with in my view.

Enjoy!