Compiled by Evelyn Ruut
Every year, Evelyn Ruut — a longtime regular of talk.religion.buddhism and one of its most prolific contributors — made a practice of collecting the best of what the newsgroup had produced. This document is her harvest for 2005, posted on January 4, 2006. It is at once a snapshot of the community's intellectual life and a document of what a thoughtful Buddhist practitioner found worth keeping: wit, Dharma, irreverence, and clarity in equal measure.
The contributors are a mix of newsgroup regulars — Tang Huyen, Stumper, Dar, Keynes, Raan, lazarhat, Lee Dillion, and others who formed the core of talk.religion.buddhism's philosophical community — alongside classical voices: the Majjhima Nikaya, Han-shan, Milarepa, Krishnamurti, Hui Neng, and a string of Western thinkers from Jefferson to Russell. The document's value lies not only in its content but in the curation: what Evelyn chose to preserve tells us what this community cared about.
In one sutta the Buddha was in fact asked whether all sentient beings would one day be liberated or not. He replied that this could not answered with a categorical answer. What could be said about the liberation of all beings however, was that all beings that are liberated, are liberated through the practise of the eightfold path and realisation of the four noble truths. Which is all the more reason for anyone with bodhisattvic intentions to dedicate oneself to this path. - provided by Anders Honore
"I am not a guru, in the sense of a spiritual teacher or an authority from which you may expect something more than what you have. When you confer spiritual authority to another person, you must realize that you are allowing them to pick your pocket and sell you your own watch." --- Alan Watts
Someone once told Jane Hirshfield, a poet who'd been a nun at Tassajara Zen Monastery, that they'd been assigned to write 3,000 words about Buddhism. She smiled and said she could say it all in 7. When put to it, she replied: "It's all connected. Everything changes. Pay attention."
"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we do not like." --Oscar Wilde
"Above all things, take heed in judging one another,
for in that ye may destroy one another...
and eat out the good of one another."-- George Fox
O monks, even if you have insight that is pure and clear but you cling to it, fondle it and treasure it, depend on it and are attached to it, then you do not understand that the teaching is like a raft that carries you across the water to the farther shore but is then to be put down and not clung to. -Majjhima Nikaya
"To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate." Martin Luther King
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
- Hanlon's Razor
For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between Science and Faith. The few have appealed to reason, to honor, to law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here in this world. The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery hereafter. The few have said "Think" The many have said "Believe!"
-Robert Ingersoll, (Gods)
Without freedom of religion and from religion there is no democracy. No country can exist as both a theocracy and a democracy.
No object of 'faith' is needed or necessary for Buddhists. We do not rely on external sources for 'salvation', nor have need of a 'savior'. It is up to the individual practitioner to discover the words and teachings of Buddha and then to act upon them accordingly -- to figuratively 'walk' the path that leads to liberation from suffering. It is our duty to point the way for others, but not necessarily drag them kicking and screaming towards the path. That choice is left to the individual. - lazarhat
[Han-shan #209 -- Red Pine]
When water is so clear it sparkles
You can see the bottom without effort
When your mind doesn't have a goal
No circumstance can distract you
Once your mind doesn't chase illusions
Even a kalpa holds no changes
If you can be so aware
From such awareness nothing hides. (provided by Stumper)
Self is an illusion, but all illusions are not self (Stumper)
"Samsara is to see fault in others" Milarepa (supplied by pannah)
"Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so." -- Bertrand Russell
"Actually, the only definition of enlightenment I have ever seen is "the absence of delusion." And delusion is defined as thinking that what is ugly is beautiful, what is impermanent is permanent, what is impure is pure and what is not self is self. Beauty and ugliness are purely subjective and really do amount to nothing but what one approves of. The same is true of purity and impurity. It is impossible to be in error about a subjective evaluation. That leaves the impermanent and not self. Very few people I have ever known are mistaken about those things. This leads me to conclude that hardly anybody is deluded. Therefore, everyone is enlightened. And if that's the case, the word is pretty near meaningless, since it excludes nothing. And therefore it is a good candidate for being abandoned. (unknown)
"The spiritual path is never one of achievement; it is always one of letting go. The more we let go, the more there is empty and open space for us to see reality." --Sister Ayya Khema
"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppression of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day" (Thomas Jefferson).
If we choose for ourselves, we must allow others to choose also, and so reciprocally, this establishes religious liberty. - Thomas Jefferson
Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle. - Thomas Jefferson
"And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." -Thomas Jefferson: Founding Father, Third President and Leader of the Democratic-Republican party (precursor to the Democratic party)
Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit. - Ghandi
If we want to cultivate a true spirit of democracy we cannot afford to be intolerant. Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause. - Ghandhi
We all try to define the experience of being for all we are worth, because it is so scary to realize that no definition will suffice and that we are really all fundamentally alone. Some invent a god and a whole cosmology to provide them with some sort of a cocoon that they imagine will give them comfort. Yet others ride the unknown fearlessly, like a surfer rides a wave. Evelyn Ruut
Give light and people will find their own way. (unknown, but provided by Bernie Cozier)
Lama Zopa Rinpoche says that even if you say mantras with right intentions to the dried bone of an animal, human, whatever,. that being will benefit. - Victoria
(conversational excerpt)
Faith is trust without evidence. Confidence is trust with evidence. -Dexter Duncan
I like that... though you can have faith with evidence as well, in fact you'll have stronger faith if you do. Karma Tsering
"It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." - Thomas Paine, "The Age of Reason"
..Like dust that covers the mirror: you have to clean the dust. Because our
mind has all the potential to see emptiness, to be free from all the
suffering causes, to be free from death, even to achieve ultimate
liberation, which is called full enlightenment, which is the
cessation of even the very subtle negative imprints left on the mental
continuum. By ceasing that our mind becomes fully awakened. This
realization of emptiness is something that makes you to be liberated from
the whole entire suffering, including the cycle of death and rebirth. What
creates the death? This ignorance, not knowing the ultimate nature of the I
and the ultimate nature of the mind. What is I? And what is mind?
Realizing that it is totally nonexistent, empty, that it is false and a
hallucination...
You have to clean the dust. It is empty. It is empty but it is not
totally nonexistent.
-Lama Zopa Rinpoche
It's OK to have thoughts.
Just don't let them have you. Keynes
"Is it not written that every fish sees a different pond when they're all in the same boat?" -- Lu-Tze
We humans are thrown in life, don't know where we come from (or even of we come from somewhere) and where we go (or even if we go somewhere), and get to know who we are and what we do after the fact. Awakening is the most after-the-fact thing in our life, when we forego the a priori and simply receive the a posteriori just the way it is, not the way we wish it to be or think it to be. The Buddha found out his awakening by total chance, and had no idea what it was until after he had had it. Nobody could even tell him what it was like, even less how to get it. Surely it cannot be cogitated into. The more one thinks about it the farther one gets away from it. That is the whole mystery of awakening, from the Buddha on down. Tang Huyen
Mumon's Verse: The spring flowers, the autumn moon; Summer breezes, winter snow. If useless things do not clutter your mind, You have the best days of your life.
- provided by David Kotchessa
John Tarrant-roshi says that Awakening is just an accident. Practice only makes you accident-prone. Provided by Messer Xin
The source of all is the undead, the unbecome, the absolute, the supreme principle by which energies emerge as forces and as material. How it plays out into energies of desire or ego is dependent upon all of its previous factors and attributes, all inclusive. And with perspectives as varied as grains of sand on a beach, how it plays against itself, is anybody's guess. - "Jim Elder" "Jen". Lee Frank.
This is from The Floating Opera by John Barth
"A good habit to acquire, if you are interested in disciplining your strength, is the habit of habit-breaking. For one thing, to change your habits deliberately on occasion prevents you from being entirely consistent (I believe I explained the virtues of limited inconsistency earlier); for another, it prevents your becoming any more a vassal than you have to. Do you smoke? Stop smoking for a few years. Do you part your hair on the left? Try not parting it at all. Do you sleep on your left side, to the right of your wife? Sleep on your stomach, on her left. You have hundreds of habits: of dress, of manner, of speech, of eating, of thought, of aesthetic taste, of moral conduct. Break them now and then, deliberately, and institute new ones in their places for a while. It will slow you up sometimes, but you'll tend to grow strong and feel free. To be sure, don't break all your habits. Leave some untouched forever; otherwise you'll be consistent."
Krishnamurti: "Do you also see that the religious people who have supposedly abandoned the world are still really in it, because their conduct is governed by the same ambitions, the same drive to fulfill, to become, to realize, to attain, to grasp and to keep?
The objects of this drive are called spiritual and seem to be different from the objects of the drive in the world, but they are not different at all because the drive is exactly the same movement.
These religious people also are caught in formulas, ideals, imagination, hopes, vague certainties, which are only beliefs - and they also become old, ugly and hollow. So the world A which they have left is exactly the same as the world B of the so-called spiritual life. A is B, and B is A. In this so-called spiritual world you are destroyed just as you were destroyed in that other everyday world." (provided by Ch'an Fu)
"Now, O monks, what is worldly freedom? The freedom connected with the material. What is unworldly freedom? The freedom connected with the immaterial. And what is the still greater unworldly freedom? When a taint-free monk looks upon his mind that is freed of greed, freed of hatred, and freed of delusion, then there arises freedom." sn36-031.html
Have you ever heard awakening?
Or smelled enlightenment?
What color is metta (lovingkindness)?
Awakening sounds like a blue sky.
Enlightenment smells like moonlight.
Metta has the color of mother.
--
~Stumper
"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."
-- H.L. Mencken
"The spiritual path is never one of achievement; it is always one of letting go. The more we let go, the more there is empty and open space for us to see reality."
--Sister Ayya Khema
Try to imagine that nothing is real including you. Like it is all a dream with no reality behind it or to it and none even dreaming it. Like a life in all it's splendor and a total universe around it, appearing for a flash and then forever gone and no one to remember it. Any of this getting it across? -- ></> /Raan
In grace everything is right, everything is just, everything is perfect, everything in this world is just exactly as it should be and nothing needs to be made any more perfect than it already is. It can't. --Tang Huyen
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
"When our mind works freely without any hindrance and is at liberty to come and go, we attain samadhi of prajna, or liberation. Such a state is called the function of thoughtlessness. But to refrain from thinking of anything, so that all thoughts are suppressed, is to be Dharma-ridden and this is an erroneous view." -- Hui Neng
"The true critical thinker accepts what few people ever accept -- that one cannot routinely trust perceptions and memories."
--James Alcock, "The Belief Engine"
"If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests." ---D'Holbach (supplied by Julian)
"Contemplate vicious words as merit and virtue, then vicious words become one's wise and good advisers. Do not let abuse and slander arouse enmity or liking. How else can the power of compassion and patience with non-production be manifest?" chungdaoca-english.htm (from Stumper)
There are no saints,
There are no sinners,
It's just a bunch of fucking monkeys. (Dar)
Try it. Pick a fight you don't have a dog in and you will invariably find the nasty stuff each sides says about the other is always true, and conversely, the nice things they say about themselves is mostly bullshit. (Dar)
If (you) have so much admiration for the Israelis;
A mom and kid get killed, they assassinate the others sides' leader.
If only that had been done with Iraq.
War being (seen as) more moral than assassination just shows how much we're baboons tied into hierarchical thinking that its more moral to kill all the king's horses and all the kings men before requesting the king surrender.
We are Saddam's Weapon of Mass Destruction.
(bet ya didnt see that one comin) -- Dar
When the word 'self' is used everyone thinks they know what it means. It means someone among other someones who acts deliberately, driven by his emotions and intellect, subject to attractions and aversions, full of opinions and passions, and striving for success against the world and all comers by any means necessary.
When it's said that God is a self, then we get God the wrathful, God the whimsical, God the fallible of the old testament.
That sort of self is the definition of delusion.
So why use that word and increase confusion? - Keynes
Life sucks.
Things change.
Don't take it personal.
"The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What I love about Buddhism is the way in which flippant, banal responses may contain so much value if I take them at the experiential and not at the philosophical level. ---Lee Dillion
Colophon
Originally posted by Evelyn Ruut to talk.religion.buddhism on January 4, 2006, as an annual retrospective of the newsgroup's best contributions. Ruut was one of talk.religion.buddhism's most dedicated members, known for her compilations of wisdom from the group's many traditions. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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