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This is a question for David or any of you. It is my impression that Amidha Buddha is usually presented as a masculine Buddha. And I even painted him in this way. So I'm curious why Amidha Buddha is not represented in a feminine form as the feeling…
"Another take on this might come from Chinese medicine and the Neijing where they talk about Biàn transformations which are about growth, and development or the yang movement, and Huà transformations which take place by breaking down. A very concrete…"
"I continue to be amazed by how deep Chinese thought and philosophy goes. How could Dogen not have drawn from this. So his phrase "That the self manifests the ten thousand things is delusion. That the ten thousand things manifest the self is…"
"This chapter does seem a bit disjointed compared to other chapters. Perhaps this character at end of first line "bu ren" which you have translated as "benevolent" could be translated as "impartial". And perhaps "straw dogs" is a metaphor pointing to…"
"Nice. A lot to reflect on here. Thank you"
"This character, 玄 is translated by Wang Pi, an early Taoist philosopher at "dark-enigma" which attempts to name the mystery as both Absence and Presence as a a single generative tissue. In Buddhist tradition we might use "suchness" here.
His…"
His…"
"Yes. In fact his book, Psychotherapy and Zen was the first book I ever read on Zen. That was a long time ago."
"nice"
"I'm really struck by how often in American Zen with associate Zen with Buddhism but rarely connect it to Taoism. Certainly, Chan was enriched by Mahayana Buddhism, but it was also shaped in many ways by Taoism, which in some ways might have actually…"
" I've been reading these translations without ever questioning how it was translated and now am beginning to appreciate how difficult it is to really get inside the Chinese mind, so I want to go back to the source - to struggle with the Chinese…"
"I would like to try my hand at translating this, but have a hard time even finding the characters in my dictionary. Can you give the pinyin pronunciation of the characters? That might help me find them. I'm a novice here, so it takes me a long time…"
"This seems much like Amida Buddhist practices where there is less emphasis on agency, a way of acting that draws no attention to the self as the actor. But there seems to be no metaphysical "other" in this teaching. "
"So it seems from what you are saying here that the Tao is a kind of dialectic. It's describing a swinging between two poles and it would be unwise to focus on one or the other since they both are in the process of creating each other. Seems like a…"
"My understanding is that both the philosophical and the religious Daoism existed along side each other. The philosophical Daoism was taken up mostly by intellectuals, poets and artists while the religious Daoism was a kind of folk religion practiced…"
