Hi Shokai,
on your very interesting blog you wrote:
"In the particularly hard-hit Aceh Province of Indonesia, several statues of Buddha were reportedly unmoved by the flood waters. One news account quotes a Buddhist monk as saying: "The people are not living according to religious virtues. Nature has given them some punishment, because they are not following the path of the Lord Buddha. The people have to learn their lesson." In my opinion, such a view is a fundamental misinterpretation of the Buddha-dharma.[...]"
exactly!
BTW: As far I know it was in Sri Lanka
you have also wrote:
"While many Buddhist web sites express sympathy and compassion for the victims and survivors, and provide links to relief organizations, they don't seem to be offering a Buddhist interpretation of the events."
You are right - it's true and that's also why i was glad to see this article (cbs again):
"CBS News went to a Buddhist temple and asked why.
The monk there explained that under his religion, the answer is, "just because."
"This is how nature works, it is like a cycle," says Vidura, a Buddhist monk.
"From time to time these things happen. We never know where it happens."
There is Dukkha, there is Anicca, there is Anatta...
Greetings from Cologne to Atlanta:
Suiram
I'm in complete agreement. The world is simply thus, including occasional earthquakes and tsunamis. In this world of samsara, even following the path leading to the cessation of suffering does not nullify the First Noble Truth of the existence of suffering. So no matter how sincere the practice of the people may be, rain will still fall, people will still grow old and die, and the earth will still occasionally shake.
However, as pleasant as it was to receive that note this morning, I didn't have much time to linger, because it was my morning to do newcomers' instruction at the Zen Center. We had five visitors: one guy, a couple and a mother and son. I enjoy doing the newcomers' sessions since it gives me the chance to re-experience "beginner's mind." After the instruction was complete, I stayed around for a not-particularly-memorable dharma talk. After the talk, while everyone else was eating (we serve a brunch after the Sunday morning dharma talk), I sat zazen alone in the zendo for an hour. I completed my day at the zendo with a Board of Directors' meeting from 1 to 3.
On the way home, I stopped at the dive shop. Jerry, one of the divers on my November trip to Grand Cayman, was kind enough to make everyone else a CD of his pictures, and had left them at the shop. Not to be a narcissist, but here's the one I found the most interesting (that is, here's the one of me):
This evening, I went to Smith's Old Bar in Ansley Park to hear Rebecca Martin. Rebecca is a singer/songwriter, and the daughter of Terry Martin, who, among other things, is my father's girlfriend. So I guess that makes Rebecca kind of a friend of the family's.
I had never heard Rebecca's music, but I had read favorable reviews in the New York Times. According to Ben Ratliff (August 23, 2004), her last album, Middlehope, a collection of standards and songs by other composers, "suggested a strong musical personality with an intuitive undercurrent: Ms. Martin's mannerisms didn't seem indebted to any jazz singer in particular." Of her latest album, People Behave Like Ballads, he notes "the songs are all hers this time, and nearly every one carries a chilling mule-kick, originating either in Ms. Martin's lyrics, her singing or the arrangements of her modest band."
Maybe so. I haven't heard the album. But if jazz can be defined at all, the best definition of it I ever heard was "improvised music to a syncopated beat." If you can accept that definition, then what I heard at Smith's tonight has no relationship to jazz at all. Maybe it's called "jazz" because she wears a beret on her album cover.
Rebecca Martin was touring the south solo, using only her guitar for accompaniment. Mr. Ratliff noted that "a lot of these songs sound written around that instrument, suggested by the harmonies of sliding parallel chords; every once in a while there's a hint of Joni Mitchell, who has composed similarly." Yes, but Joni Mitchell's songs left open spaces for improvisation, and occasionally, her music swinged. Neither was on display at Smith's tonight. Ms. Martin's guitar playing stuck to the chords, and suggested what was once called "folk music" more than any other genre, and nearly everything was played in a monotonous mid-tempo. "Even when I try to write up-tempo songs," she joked at one point, "they come out mid-tempo."
"She doesn't write the same song over and over," Ratliff noted. Maybe not, but at Smith's tonight, all of the songs certainly sounded the same. This could be blamed on the limits of appearing solo, or the gruelling road schedule on which she's been (she had played in Athens, Georgia earlier in the day). She was obviously tired - she seemed to have lost her way or forgotten what she was playing at times during several songs, and couldn't seem to decide on the set list at other times. Only on one of the last songs, Thoroughfare, did her playing seem to come to life, and she even attempted a little bit of vocal improvisation with the title.
I went to the show with my friend Jeff. Jeff and I get together every so often, and compare notes on what we've done and where we've been. This time around, Jeff had me trumped: he had just come back from Italy (Rome, Florence and Venice) where, among other things, he proposed to his Russian girlfriend, Karina. Kind of beat any stories I've told here since last October.
But anyway, Jeff and I got to Smith's about an hour before the show and introduced ourselves to Ms. Martin. She was extremely gracious with her time, coming as it did just before her show, and we chatted about our family friends, life in Maine (her home state - she now lives in the Catskills), the environment and Buddhism before we let her excuse herself to go do her soundcheck.
Between the soundcheck and the show, Jeff and I did what any two guys would do in a bar with time to kill - we shot a game of pool.
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