[MD] The MoQ and Politics? part 2 of 3

[John Carl]

Marsha:

There is a time when one's attention should be oriented toward external
> duties, and there is a time when one's focus should be towards inner
> processes.  Society will constantly prescribe what the former should be,
> but for me the latter is to cultivate one's own understanding and virtue.
>
>
>
See?  Flexible lines all over the place!  I see "one's own understanding" to
be in actuality, itself a social construct of aspects of the self that
you've gotten from readings or teachings.  In the end, there really is
nothing that comes entirely from within.  It's just which voices you heed in
the moment.

I don't know about Zen's zazen  It's interesting, though, that the
> "dharma combat" that mentioned the other day was described as a Zen
> practice for advanced monks.  Seems there is more to Zen than "just
> sitting."
> Also I have heard the Zen has more written about it than any other form of
> Buddhism.  I happen to love Nargarjuna's MMK.  The more I read of it, the
> more I understand and appreciate its wisdom.  No dogma there!   I think in
> the Tibetan tradition meditation is as much about grounding one's
> understanding of emptiness as seeking realization.  Both.
>
> I wouldn't trust what any man or group of men might say about Lila, or
> women.  I understand her to represent the play, or dance, of life.  The men
> who denigrate Lila seem mostly afraid of their own inability to control
> their
> passions.   It's not just the Buddhists, the early Greeks and Romans were
> just as bad.  The three Abrahamic religions too.  Phooey!
>
>

Well, it sounds like you're going "Phooey" to pretty much our entire
cultural heritage!  If we throw out all teachings of men in Buddhism, the
Greeks, the Romans and the three Abrahamic traditions... well that's pretty
much the whole shootin' match right there.  What are you left to stand
upon?  Seems to me, you've got some unexamined assumptions in such a
stance.

Continued indeed!