Tag: religion

The Difference Between Gong-an and Ko-an Practice

It is bizarre to consider that as Japan descended into fascism and racism prior to WWII – the distorted, nationalistic Zen Buddhism of that time was popular in the West amongst intellectuals, despite a number of its masters expressing openly hostile attitudes toward the Western people. It is even more bizarre to consider that after WWII – many of these very same masters remained popular as they quietly pushed their formerly racist rhetoric into the background, and applied a more ‘neutral’ policy toward the acquisition of Enlightenment.

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Camelford Ch’an Week Retreat (North Cornwall)

Numbers vary dramatically, but as we are not a commercial enterprise, this is of no interest. There is always a strong inner core that keeps the teachings of Master Xu Yun (1840-1959) alive in the UK. We have been asked to Hong Kong and China in recent years, and these are invitations we intend to honour in the near future. Our last Ch’an Week Retreat (in the Sai Kung area) of Hong Kong, attracted over 50 participants in 1999, and we had to abandon the building and sit in the beautiful countryside.

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UFO: A Perceptual Exercise

Events that have what might be described as a particular ‘frequency’ of manifestation, inevitably invite a certain interpretation that becomes hot-wired into the perceptual system. However, change the manifested frequency – even only slightly – and the ‘certainty’ of what humanity thinks it know falls away completely.

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Soviet Buddhist scholar Theodore Stcherbatsky!

Buddhism: Hinayana and Mahayana Notions of Emptiness! (10.12.2014)

Through the work of Nagarjuna, the Mahayana movement developed the interpretation that physical matter is ‘empty’ of any substantiality. This is due to Nagarjuna applying his tetra lemma (catuskoti) formula to the assessment of the ‘Chain of Dependent Origination’ (Pratītyasamutpāda), and logically proving that just as the true enlightened state has no-self associated with it; then it is also equally true that physical matter has no substantiality associated with it. Everything is dependent upon everything else, conditioned by everything else, and contingent upon everything else.

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Norman Tebbit’s ‘Cricket Test’ Comes Home to Roost

This inverted or distorted impression of the world serves as the basis for the psychology of the bourgeoisie, and has been expressed on a number of occasions by the former Conservative MP – and now House of Lords member – Norman Tebbit. He served under the notorious government of Margaret Thatcher throughout the 1980’s, holding a number of important ministerial posts, and actively participating in the devastation that regime inflicted upon the people and Socialistic institutions of the UK. In April, 1990, he made an extraordinary attack on the UK’s vibrant multicultural communities. He suggested (in a widely broadcast interview) that all the socials ills in Britain were not the product of capitalism, but rather the fault of the ethnic minorities who had come to settle in the country after WWII.

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