30/4/25
The very late Pope Francis said he wanted a poor church. This sentiment reminds me of a sweet but unfortunate feeling I get from interacting with the people of Bihar, India’s poorest state. Spending most of my time in Bodh Gaya, especially in and around the Mahabodhi Temple, I’ve also made a majority of the following other Buddhist pilgrimages there: Pragbodhi, Barabar Caves, Champanagar, Dona Stupa, Ghosrawan, Gurpa, Hajipur, Kesaria Stupa, Nalanda University, Nalanda Archaeological Museum, Rajgir, and Vaishali. As one might detect, most of these are significant places of Buddhist pilgrimage.
Poverty, per se, having less than what is required to sustain a baseline of renunciation toward a worldly, sensuous absorption, is not a particularly positive virtue in Vajrayana culture. Poverty seems a poor take on reality’s plenitude and a bad place to start. Trungpa Rinpoche, who in the 1970’s transferred this culture to the Westerners more than any other lama I can think of, pushed the Tibetan Buddhist adage, money is the manure of religion.
For example, if one is poor and in need of teachings, what will be your offering in order to receive them if you have no resources? Having received teachings, how will you sustain yourself in retreat and make offerings to the Gurus, Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, tutelary deities, and protectors featured on your shrine, which include flowers, candles, incense, perfumed water, fruits and so forth? Of course, there’s always just using one’s imagination and visualizing them, especially if you are a Vajrayana practitioner. But more than one impoverished yogin has been said to have taken gold or money from their parent’s household, or their own family, to please the Guru and obtain priceless teachings. Personally, having been around samsara’s sorted block far too many times, I might do any one of these things now knowing the real value of a Dharmic matriculation.
That being said, the abuse of material wealth, substituting or mistaking it for spiritual attainment, is increasingly evident in today’s Dharma, as compared to fifty years ago, when I first took refuge in the Triple Gem. It was at that as well, Trungpa’s Rinpoche published, ‘Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.’ In brief, it’s a transcript of two lectures addressing issues of “using spiritual ideas, language, beliefs, objects, experiences, purported attainments, and practices, with an ego-centered intention, or in service of the ego, rather than for genuine spiritual growth or insight.” This was, among many curatives, a tonic to using Buddhism as just self improvement, or to simply attain long life, health, and wealth as is often done in South East Asia and China. However the term, Spiritual Materialism, in another sense, analyzes a socio-economic contradiction. That of concentrating wealth for supposedly altruistic purposes. Both Communism and Buddhism are guilty of this. I won’t go too far into it, for fear of spoiling my vows, especially those that ‘respect the robes,’ or basic integrity of the sangha as well as that of some of my more entrepreneurial vajra siblings. But having visited perhaps hundreds of Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana ruins, viharas, stupas, holy images, Ashoka pillars, I’ve seen an escalation in a kind of opulence, oneupmanship, and even sumptuousness in the construction of Wats, Gompas, and lok tas’ and lamas’ residences alike that are in close proximity to these pilgrimage sights—many saved and enhanced by the World Heritage Foundation—which suggests another correction may come.
So there’s good karmic reasons—as the Indian government increases taxation on Tibetan, Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Burmese, and other nations’ holdings—not to amass too much a material footprint for spiritualism and its practices. Certainly, no one wants to see again the kind of attempted resolution of such socio-economic contradictions that took place in Tibet at the cruel hands of the Communist Chinese. Nor in post-colonial South East Asia to the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, perpetrated by the Vietcong, Khmer Rouge, and principally, the US military, which among many atrocities, precipitated in Cambodia their auto-genocide.
Is this then why Pope Francis, and indeed the saint he named himself after, wanted to see ‘a poor church,’ one untainted, unviolated, and not violating others, due to such socio-economic contradictions and hypocrisies?
‘Poor’ then, signifying as well, a move away from the bullet proofing of one’s circumstance so as to continue unbroken the pursuit of one’s faith and devotion. Milarepa famously let go of everything, food, scriptures, and his warming blanket, when a strong wind came up outside his cave. That wind is always present, to some extent, as long as one lives beyond both the material and spiritual necessities required to become a fully enlightened Buddha.
It seems there’s two messages here. First, don’t serve the ego while attempting enlightened activity. Root it out from the beginning by bowing down to the Guru, first, and then taking refuge in The Triple Gem, not one’s ego, instead. That’s also to say, generate genuine Bodhicitta, reflective of both Compassion and Wisdom, both in aspiration and engagement. Second, don’t amass wealth that insures false security. But rather, accumulate authentic teachings, blessings, and the supremes means to realize one’s inner Milarepa, who tossed the dross of both spiritualism and materialism.
3/5
Strength is relative to effort. When we speak of strength of character we are talking about a sustained effort to be good. In Prajnaparamita literature it’s know as diligence. Sustained diligence in the other Paramita virtues, giving, moral discipline, patience, right concentration, and then wisdom—a-causal, but arising contiguously with the merit of the other five—yields Buddhahood.
The Mahayana Sutras, like the Abhisamayalamkara, Samdhinirmocana Sutras, and others say or least suggest the potential for Buddhahood is latent in every being, always. It’s known as Tathaghatagarbha, a word suggesting a ‘thus gone’ essence or ‘embryo’ that transfers from the intermediate state (tib. པར་དོ) to the womb born beings firing conception. Other, non-womb born life-forms, arise spontaneously with it. These teachings speak of Bodhisattvas ‘coursing’ in the Perfection of Wisdom—goddess mother to the Buddha’s Doctrine of Emptiness—wearing the armor of mindfully perceiving ordinary datum as none other than the dharmata of suchness. Such pure perception of suchness doesn’t ‘review’ or consider who or what is of this ultimate nature. That’s because it is none other than this nature, the pure perception of all the Sugatas, Bodhisattvas, and all others vowing to assist all beings in realizing their own Buddha nature through the strength of effort in accumulating the merit and wisdom of all those ‘thus gone.’
The Buddhas possess compassion, wisdom, and power. Concerning power, they are all powerful, meaning they are ultimately strong. This is the strength of continuous effort that is the very armor of the Bodhisattvas whose minds course the rarified inner airs of the Perfection of Wisdom. Who, riding the Garuda clutching Muchinda, lead a flock of Garudas in a victorious formation, an ever upward ascendancy in continuous pilgrimage of the Buddha fields. Where, once there, they learn what is beyond learning and meditate upon that which is beyond meditation.
This then, the Buddha has indicated, inspires one to interpret the ‘perfection of diligence’ leading the stalwart practitioner to all other virtues. Having understood how this is so, the virtue among them that is entirely beyond all virtue, Wisdom, is also realized. This was taught to me by my root Guru whom, after seeing me pained but also gained in virtue by performing one hundred and eleven thousand prostrations to him, said plainly at the conclusion of this ordeal, you have now accomplished diligence. So, and here’s the motivation for this piece, it is only now, after forty-five years of more pained effort, trial and error, that I’ve even begun to understand the value of such undeserving praise for an accomplishment entirely necessary to correctly practice the Dharma.
29/4
Last night I reached the end of the internet and this angelic, middle aged Irish woman’s face appeared and congratulated me. She ominously pronounced I’d watched all the videos on-line and was now free to do something fun, like go outside. To me it also signaled reaching the end of one’s karmic delusions, at least temporarily. And a short while later, in the rosy blessing tipped rays of the morning’s dawn, the sky-like wisdom dawned and for about an hour I saw various deities on thrones in a pale, twilit sky coming of its own accord. Completely clear and empty, its reality was bliss itself, enhanced by each degree of my just letting go within the state of profound pacification. Many angelic vulvas, javalas, and uterine receptacles appeared, as if I were in a transcendent, materially void lotus field. Puncturing the balloon of all such inflated states, I must say, is nothing new. My entire life has been marked by such moments of transcendent accomplishment. Often viewed by others as merely distortions of ‘this world,’ such censure feeds my continued effort to come ever closer to an undisclosed ‘perfection.’
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