Post Vajrayana in Kampuchea

Concerning the present conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, keep in mind three things. First, what’s called the Dangrek genocide or Preah Vihear pushback, resulting in the death of many mostly sino-Khmer refugees who wee denied asylum by the Kingdom of Thailand in June 1979.  If one travels north of those Preah Vihear cliffs, one finds one of the ancient Khmer capitals, Phimai. Its Prasat or temple ruins are a prototype to Angkor Wat’s construction and is still a dominant cultural exponent in that much Cambodian influenced area, now situated on du jour Thai soil. Second, I mention this to suggest that any disputing of present day borders based on cartography and the so-called watershed natural boundaries, designated by French colonialists, to further reduce Cambodia is grossly unfair and absurd. This, as the Khmer people’s land once extended far beyond the Dangrek Mountains, its watershed plateau   and ,  significantly, included what is now on maps as Ayutthaya an...

12/7      Renunciation has another significant aspect other than the prevention and elimination of negative karmic actions. Daily, as deluded beings, we go around attaching ourselves indiscriminately to people, places, and things that will literally come back to haunt us during the process of dying and entering the after death state. Example, while scrolling we may come across an image like Trump’s poop-stained white pants seen from behind, and finding it extremely objectionable, click again for an alternate one. But if not objectionable then we lingered. But on what are we lingering? Later, parts or aspects, perhaps even the whole of that content, are remembered and at that point we don’t feel so favorable about it. This is analogous to our ‘karmic scrolling,’ the way we go about doing this or that without much discriminating wisdom, imprinting people, places, and things that will reside at gross levels of our consciousness.       Here, they swim...

      Online Buddha dharma communications signal many things, both positive and negative, like the nature of karma itself. One thing that alarms me is how it totally socializes the teachings, contextualizing them in dependency upon others’ views, mores, and habits, conventionalizing the Buddha’s speech and one’s hearing of it to the extend one’s own insights are drowned-out. To wit, comments are often just cookie-cutter (emojis) on Dharma posting sights. So is it a great leveler, making teachings more available? Or a constant invitation just to relax efforts in traditional practice—like isolated retreats—and forestall more genuinely advanced attainments?       Virtual reality is ostensibly another ‘sealing off,’ a phrase the Romantic artist-poet, William Blake, used to describe the alienating effects of the Industrial Revolution (with its soulless, ‘satanic mills’) on society. Notably, from his revelatory fourfold, heavily anagogical, vision of the new...

      People are not ‘a thing’ but rather a ‘process’ and, according to Kant’s philosophy, an end in themselves. They are not ‘things’ to be ‘consumed’ as was the case, for example, with the kings of the Khmer Empire. Further, according to Buddha’s dharma, what one experiences is all a cause and result, or karmic, ‘projection.’ It’s the playing-out of endless cause and result episodes or strings, as is featured in Twentieth Century Physic’s String Theory. At least, this is how it can seem to our ordinary perception, if we care to notice. In ultimate reality, however, once having penetrated conventional reality’s veil of ignorance, everything is really happening at once in an interdependency that transcends time and space. It is in fact void of inherent reality because of its very causeless, connate nature, one that is simultaneous and  complimentarian with all phenomena. This is one’s primordial nature and none other than one’s own mind ‘in itself’ after a train...