Kutai Lighthouse

03 Jul 2014 Leave a comment

by Anupadin in Buddhism Tags: , , , , ,

Suzanne Vega - Tom's DinerWe are off to see Suzanne Vega at The Lighthouse theatre in Poole tonight. She is, and has been, one of my favourite singers for decades, so I am really looking forward to the concert.

As I often do, and I’m sure you do too, I’ve been listening to her back catalogue since I bought the tickets a couple of weeks ago.

Each song is like an old friend and arrives bringing a plethora of memories with it. Those memories, in Buddhist terms are held in a state called Ku, or Kutai, where something exists and doesn’t exist all at the same time.

The human brain is an amazing thing. On the one hand we can remember people and events from forty years and more ago. On the other, I can walk from the lounge into the kitchen and forget why I went in the first place, and I know we’ve all been there.

Amazing stuff that grey matter, a hugely complex system of neurons and synapses awash in a cocktail of serotonin, dopamine and countless other magical neurotransmitters, all busy doing their own thing, but all in sync. And all it needs, to switch on some memory buried deep in time, is a handful of notes in a particular sequence.

Here are a few rather shaky images from the show …

Suzanne Vega - Live In Poole

Suzanne Vega - Live In Poole

Suzanne Vega - Live In Poole

Praise Is Not A Bad Thing

23 Jan 2013 2 Comments

by Anupadin in Buddhism Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

A Truly Wise Man - click for the full size imageI was surprised at work today, when one of our philatelic experts pulled me up short for heaping praise upon her. In my mind, she had done a terrific job identifying a particularly rare and valuable Liberian stamp, and had emailed a client with details, and more importantly, an elusive image.

Having emailed her, I was surprised to receive a reply saying

“Hang on…..I thought we were supposed to treat praise and blame the same….i.e. ignore :-)”

She is a really lovely lady and we have spoken about Buddhism on a number of occasions, but I felt I had to explain that praise, like money, is not a problem. It is the love of praise or money that causes the trouble, the root of all evil, some might say.

I illustrated the principle by sending her the quotation from one of Nichiren’s many letters to his disciple Shojo Kingo in which he says

“Worthy persons deserve to be called so because they are not carried away by the eight winds: prosperity, decline, disgrace, honour, praise, censure, suffering, and pleasure. They are neither elated by prosperity nor grieved by decline.”

The eight winds are those conditions that, although impossible to avoid in life, may prevent a person from travelling along the path to enlightenment. People are often swayed either by their attachment to prosperity, honour, praise, and pleasure (collectively known as “four favourites” or “four favourable winds”), or by their aversion to decline, disgrace, censure, and suffering (“four dislikes” or “four adverse winds”).

So we can see that the winds themselves are not the only challenge. In fact, it is our response to the challenges, whether we are carried away by the winds, or not, that shows us how far along out own path to enlightenment we have actually come. We see that praise itself is not a bad thing, it can benefit the receiver as well as the giver, but it is the attachment to that praise that leads to problems.