Saturday, July 30, 2011

"Things that one carries ..."



Worth listening to, if you have the time.

"Garry Trudeau was outside my office." (47:27)












"Oh, I awoke in anger. So alone and terrified." (Bob Dylan, from "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine")

Still thinking about Mahalia's image of God's hands holding everything (everything) and Buddha's hands holding emptiness, and now having seen that cartoon from Garry Trudeau, and recalling that at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, California, where my friend Richard died, and where the Darrah Westrup works with women veterans, there was a Zen Buddhist chaplain available in spring of 2008. I wonder what he or she would say to a woman veteran.

From the Dalai Lama:

Q: You have said that according to Buddhist philosophy there is no Creator, no God of creation, and this may initially put off many people who believe in a divine principle. Can you explain the difference between the Vajrayana Primordial Buddha and a Creator God?

A: I understand the Primordial Buddha, also known as Buddha Samantabhadra, to be the ultimate reality, the realm of the Dharmakaya-- the space of emptiness [am's italics] --where all phenomena, pure and impure, are dissolved ...

And then I came across this, in contrast to Mahalia's imagery and the imagery of the Buddha's empty hands:

No one can keep us from carrying God
Wherever we go. (from the Persian Sufi, Hafiz)

"Things that one carries ..."

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