DharmaflixWiki:Community Portal
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[edit] Announcements or Comments for the Community
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[edit] Aware & Thoughtful reviewers needed
Please participate by adding appropriate films with Dharma content and with reviews or by editing reviews. Bring the Dharma in the films to everyone's awareness. How to participate...
[edit] Buddhist Chaplain Danny Fisher mentions DharmaFlix.com in his blog.
[edit] Buddhist Priest Mugo mentions DharmaFlix in her blog
[edit] Kind words from Peter Hata of the Living Dharma Website & West Covina Buddhist Temple
Thank you for letting us know you've copied material from our site. We've found material from our site all over the internet, but rarely do webmasters let us know or, come to think of it, actually ask first. By the way, you are free to use any material on our site (thank you for including the links back to our site).
That aside, I visited your site and think that it adds a new and interesting perspective not only on the use of film as a vehicle for Buddhist teachings, but also on the use of the web to create new kinds of virtual sanghas, in this case, those with a shared interest in Buddhist-oriented films. Our temple is a traditional Jodo Shinshu temple that just happens to have its foot in the door of the internet through our Living Dharma Website. Your "temple" is, I take it, an entirely virtual one that provides new avenues for the sharing of the Dharma even as it may raise questions about such virtual sanghas. But ultimately, I think use of the internet to help share the teachings will only increase in the future, and I will add a link to your site on our Links Page. Thank you for your contributions to the sharing of the Dharma.
Please keep us informed about developments at your website.
Best Wishes, Peter Hata The Living Dharma Website West Covina Buddhist Temple
[edit] Reply to Peter Hata
Thanks so much for your kind thoughts. I have posted your email in the community section of our website. I hadn't really conceived of the site as a virtual temple, but I do think of the collaboration in terms of a world wide sangha of the Buddha. Certain films were so powerful for me, and they inspired me when I just started on the path. And perhaps more importantly they inspired me before I was on the path because they expressed that the world is very different from the way common sense and the mainstream western philosophical tradition keeps telling us it is. Certain films are the art of the living dharma, a dharma that shows rather than tells. And other films are infused with dharma like the springtime air is when flowers bloom. I think that with the video clips now available on the web, a different kind of introduction to the spirit of Buddhism is possible - one true to the wondrous and radical heart of the dharma. There are many Americans who think Buddhism is just another religion. I hope the website will disabuse them of that notion. Take care.
- ) B
[edit] Back from month in Lhasa
Been gone to Tibet for a month and just returned. :)
Photos: http://dreddy.com/Travel/Tibet07/d12/index.htm More Photos:http://www.flickr.com/photos/14362205@N02
[edit] Discussion of DharmaFlix and Mary Poppins on Thrice Taboo
[edit] WSJ article on making Buddhism more like Christianity and Judaism.
Buddhist Boomers: A Meditation By CLARK STRAND November 9, 2007; Page W13
A colleague recently took me to task for consulting Jews and Christians on how to keep American Buddhism alive. He didn't agree with either premise -- that Jews and Christians could offer advice to Buddhists, or that Buddhism was in any danger of decline. But he was wrong on both counts. American Buddhism, which swelled its ranks to accommodate the spiritual enthusiasms of baby boomers in the late 20th century, is now aging. One estimate puts the average age of Buddhist converts (about a third of the American Buddhist population) at upwards of 50. This means that the religion is almost certain to see its numbers reduced over the next generation as boomer Buddhists begin to die off without having passed their faith along to their children. And Jewish and Christian models offer the most logical solution for reversing that decline.
The basic problem is that non-Asian converts tend not to regard what they practice as a religion. From the beginning, Buddhism has been seen in its American incarnation not as an alternative religion, but as an alternative to religion. American converts have long held Buddhism apart from what they see as the inherent messiness of Western religious discourse on such issues as faith and belief, and from the violence that has so often accompanied it.
The author Sam Harris, though not himself a Buddhist, is nevertheless fairly representative of this point of view. In his book "The End of Faith," Mr. Harris is strongly critical of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but he gives Buddhism a free pass. "Buddhism has also been a source of ignorance and occasional violence," he concedes, but "it is not a religion of faith, or a religion at all in the Western sense."
Mr. Harris goes so far as to claim that "the esoteric teachings of Buddhism offer the most complete methodology we have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered by any dogma." He likens the Dalai Lama's encounters with Christian ecclesiastics to a meeting between Cambridge physicists and Kalahari Bushmen, which is offensive on so many levels -- to Christians, to Buddhists, to Bushmen, and maybe even to physicists -- that one hardly knows where to begin. And yet most American converts would probably agree with Mr. Harris's portrayal of Buddhism as an empirically based spiritual practice. In its pure, idealized form (which, admittedly, exists mostly in the minds of Western converts), that practice is relatively free of dogma and superstition. Unfortunately, it is also free of folk tales, family and -- dare I say it -- fun.
For the most part American converts don't see this as a problem. When I suggested to my colleague that he might want to think of ways to integrate his Buddhist experience into the long-term life of his family, and that he might look to existing religious models, like his local synagogue, for ideas on how to do that (rather than to the out-of-state monastery where he goes alone on retreat twice yearly), he answered shortly, "When my kids get old enough, they can decide for themselves whether to meditate or not."
It's an argument I have heard before. Having left the religion of their birth, often with good reason, American converts tend to be wary of anything approaching religious indoctrination, even if that means failing to offer their children the basics of a religious education. This has the advantage of giving Buddhist children great freedom of religious expression, with the disadvantage of not giving them any actual religion to express. The result is a generation of children with a Buddhist parent or two but no Buddhist culture to grow up in.
What does this mean for the non-Buddhist culture at large? Why be concerned that so few Buddhist baptisms, weddings or funerals occur among Buddhist converts each year that most of them have no idea what such ceremonies even look like, or that years after their conversion, their extended families persist in thinking of them as basically Jewish or Catholic at heart? The answer is surprising all around.
In the contemporary discourse on religion, it is striking how often Buddhism is privileged over Judaism, Christianity or Islam as a scientifically based or inherently peaceful version of religion. Note that the Dalai Lama (rather than the pope) was asked to provide the inaugural address at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 2005, even though, like Catholicism, Tibetan Buddhism includes beliefs (think reincarnation) that are anathema to medical science. Likewise, though Japanese Buddhists melted their temple bells to make bombs during World War II, the idea of Buddhism as a peace-loving religion persists as an enduring fantasy in Western people's minds. And yet, such fantasies are instructive nonetheless.
Though some of my more devout Buddhist associates may balk at the idea, these days I have increasingly come to see Buddhism in America as an elaborate thought experiment being conducted by society at large -- from the serious practitioner who meditates twice daily to the person who remarks in passing, "Well, if I had to be something, I guess I'd be a Buddhist." The object of that experiment is not to import some "authentic" version of Buddhism from Asia, as some believe, but to imagine a new model for religion altogether -- one that is nondogmatic, practice-based and peaceful.
In that case, all the more reason to keep Buddhism in America alive. But to keep that experiment running (as it must if it is ever to yield practical results for the broader religious culture), it has to get itself grounded in the realities of American family life. That is why I tell every Buddhist I meet these days to make friends with a local priest or rabbi and ask what kinds of programs he (or she) is offering for children and families. For if Buddhism has much to offer the West, it surely has much to receive as well. Whatever new religious model is going to emerge over the next 100 years as the result of the inevitable cross-pollination of religious cultures in America, one can only hope that it will preserve the best of East and West.
Mr. Strand is a contributing editor to Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and the author of "How to Believe in God (Whether You Believe in Religion or Not)," forthcoming from Doubleday Religion.[1]
[edit] Neural Buddhists in the NY Times
The Neural Buddhists By DAVID BROOKS
In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,” in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists.
To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.
In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. You put a magnetic helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having a spiritual epiphany. If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God.
Wolfe understood the central assertion contained in this kind of thinking: Everything is material and “the soul is dead.” He anticipated the way the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.
Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.
The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as “The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world.
And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going end up challenging faith in the Bible.
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.
Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.
Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.
This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.
If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.
First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.
In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.
In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.[2]
[edit] Yoga on Wall Street
[edit] Yoga Bears: It's No Stretch to Say Traders Are Taking Deep Breaths Financiers Bend Over Backwards to Ease Stress of Turbulent Markets; Chants Optional
By CASSELL BRYAN-LOW July 24, 2008
Twice a week, New York hedge-fund manager Michael Karsch does a trade many financial professionals wouldn't attempt: He swaps his bank of computers for a blue mat, sweatpants and some "sun salutations," a flowing series of poses including forward bends. [yoga_promo]1 David M. Russell for The Wall Street Journal Employees at D.E. Shaw & Co. attended a yoga class in a conference room at the company's New York office on June 24.
Mr. Karsch is one of a growing number of bankers, traders and money managers who, in a time of market turbulence, are looking to the ancient Indian discipline of yoga in search of inner peace. From yoga, he knows to "take a step back, have a breath and stay focused," says Mr. Karsch, of Karsch Capital Management LP, a roughly $3 billion fund.
Yoga, of course, has been growing in popularity for years in the West. The magazine Yoga Journal estimates that about 15.8 million people in the U.S., or 7% of adults, now practice it. Today, studios and private teachers in New York and London report increasing demand from financiers. Allianz SE's Pacific Investment Management Co., D.E. Shaw & Co. and Karsch Capital are among the companies playing host to yoga classes.
Billionaire fund managers Paul Tudor Jones and William Gross both practice Ashtanga, an active form of yoga that involves flowing through a set series of poses. Bond-fund guru Mr. Gross, a founder of Pimco, does yoga five days a week and says some of his best ideas come when he is standing on his head, or sirsasana, supported by the forearms on the floor.
At Karsch Capital, about a third of the 33 employees take yoga classes at the company's 26th-floor Manhattan offices each week. Still, hard-core yoga on the job is a bit much for the boss. Since he's at the office, Mr. Karsch wears socks during class instead of going barefoot. And he omits some poses. "I still feel like doing handstands during work is a little inappropriate," Mr. Karsch says.
Mr. Karsch, 40 years old, started doing yoga three years ago on the recommendation of a fellow hedge-fund manager, John Griffin, founder of Blue Ridge Capital LLC in New York. Blue Ridge Capital also holds yoga sessions at the office.
D.E. Shaw, a $39 billion New York hedge fund known for using complex computer models, recently started offering hourlong yoga classes at the office. About 80 of the company's 750 New York employees have signed up for the sessions, which have been so popular they often are oversubscribed. "There's been tremendous demand," says spokeswoman Darcy Bradbury, who attends the classes herself. At Pimco, Mr. Gross has prompted senior colleagues to start stretching, and the company holds morning yoga sessions during client conferences and staff retreats.
The yoga industry, shrugging off its brown-rice-eating-and-sandal-wearing image, is adapting to and courting its new, wealthy customers. Yoga retreats in places like Malibu -- which offer grueling regimens of several hours of yoga a day -- have become popular destinations for the finance crowd.
Catharina Hedberg owns a yoga retreat called The Ashram in the Southern California hills near Malibu and says she has seen an increase in finance types attending over the past five years. Now, about a quarter of her customers, who pay $4,250 for a one-week stay, are financiers. The retreat offers a hard-core program of 6 a.m. yoga sessions with an alcohol-free, caffeine-free vegetarian diet that she says is popular with the Wall Street crowd. "Every week you see someone from hedge funds," says Ms. Hedberg.
Implicit Challenge
Yoga is a philosophy with roots in Hindu texts, though for many people who practice yoga in the West today, it's a form of exercise. Yoga incorporates stretches, balances and twists to increase strength and flexibility, while focusing on steady breathing to calm the mind. The practice dates back thousands of years and teaches spiritual growth.
Teachers say one key principle poses an implicit challenge to Wall Streeters: Value the process of hard work rather than the rewards it brings.
Finance "is the antithesis of what yoga is about in terms of inner peace," says Claire Missingham, a yoga teacher in London. But Ms. Missingham, whose pupils have included bankers and hedge-fund managers, says it can be highly beneficial for them. Yoga traditionalists say practicing yoga should be about more than just gaining physical benefits: It's a way of approaching life, including work. "Yoga teaches you to embrace fear and cultivate patience," says Ms. Missingham.
Some financiers are introduced to yoga by their spouses. Some turn to it after suffering sports injuries. Some endure teasing from friends. It's "considered soft" by some, says Mr. Karsch.
The yoga industry is estimated to be worth about $5.7 billion annually in the U.S., according to Yoga Journal, which is owned by Active Interest Media Inc. in El Segundo, Calif., The figure includes classes, equipment, vacations and magazines.
Michael Wald and his wife, Julie, run a business called Namaste New York that caters to the financial crowd. It offers private yoga lessons and group classes at the office, often scheduled for before or after market close. Cellphones and BlackBerry devices are forbidden in class, though assistants occasionally interrupt a session. The largely female network of teachers are instructed to not wear anything too clingy. And, no chanting.
In general, yoga classes often involve a few minutes of group chanting at the start or end of the class. One common chant is "Om," or "aum" in Sanskrit, which has many meanings but is considered to be the root of all sounds and represents the balance of the mind, body and spirit at the heart of yoga. "It's too far out of the box for our customers," Mr. Wald says.
Namaste has about 20 corporations as clients, which pay as much as $65,000 annually, as well as roughly 60 individual clients paying about $150 to $225 per session. In recent months, as markets have gone wild, Mrs. Wald has noticed increased tension in the neck and back of her clients. Another sign of stress among her students: difficulty sitting still.
Andrew Goldfarb, co-founder of venture capital firm Globespan Capital Partners LLC, in Boston, spends about half an hour each evening doing stretches such as the pigeon and the happy-baby pose. For the pigeon pose, you sit straddled on the floor with the front leg bent in and the back leg straight out behind you. For the happy-baby pose, you lie on your back with your legs bent slightly apart and your feet toward the ceiling. The two poses relax the hips and lower back. Before a tense meeting, he breathes deeply, which gives "a level of equanimity," says 40-year-old Mr. Goldfarb.
Taking It in Stride
Luciano Cortese, a broad-shouldered 48-year-old hedge-fund manager, says he used to bang his desk, throw things or yell at someone when his job became particularly stressful. But since starting yoga in January, he has been taking the stock market's jolts in stride, he says. "I just say to myself tomorrow is another day."
One morning recently, a barefoot Mr. Cortese gingerly moved through a series of forward bends, backward arches and twists on his yoga mat laid out in the television room of his Long Island, N.Y., home. His personal instructor, Kirtan Smith, encouraged Mr. Cortese to focus on his breathing and helped maneuver him deeper into the postures. Small beads of sweat glistened on the fund manager's forehead. At the end of the hour-and-a-half-long session, Mr. Cortese lay on his back for a few minutes of relaxation, or savasana. He dozed off, snoring lightly. When he awoke, he bounded upstairs to check the market on his computer.
Write to Cassell Bryan-Low at cassell.bryan-low@wsj.com2[3]
