The tension of transit Uranus in Taurus and Saturn in Aquaria square certainly manifests not only on many front of philosophical discussions, but also the strongest Hurricane on record in Florida, and the sudden explosion in the European gas pipeline. We hardly have a moment of break from these prolonged pressure. We also believe everything happen for a reason. The biggest struggle being the “self/ego ” having a hard time to accept the impermanent nature of phenomenon. Clinging to the past, people can not accept the change emotionally. Thus the desire set us up for disappointment and delusion because it is against the nature law. This is exactly how the suffer start as Buddha told us. It is not the phenomenon that delude us, but the our insistence on the permanence of the phenomenon that delude ourselves because ego desires to hold onto to something of non-existence nature. These inner struggle resonate to the outside events as we observed.
Western civilization rising out of the industrialization and colonization of last five hundred years, is witnessing a total collapse all the way to the decay of its foundation -the scientific thinking, reductionist philosophies, and social darwinism, promoting extreme egos and self-righteous individualism, inevitably wreck the whole system at every fronts and bring chaos to every corners of the world. The western countries started to feel most uncomfortable when the eastern/developing countries counteract by deploying the same type of tactics/mentality the westerner exported to them. As the saying goes, what goes around comes around. In this way, we experienced two world wars in a short one hundred-year period and is now on the verge of having a third one, potentially nuclear annihilation. We are at the point of what HOPI Prophecy revealed to us as early as 1970s. Man’s inability to live on Earth in a spiritual way will come to a crossroad of great problems. Our greed and extreme pursuit of materialism had led to the downfall of civilization. 正如《华严经》中云：“分别取向不见佛，毕竟离着乃能见“。
In an barefaced article entitled The Ego as the Root of Conflict, Mark Sircus, a professor of oncology presented the western psyche and mindset : Most people think of the ego as something they value, their individual separate uniqueness, and they cannot distinguish it from their real being. The idea of “getting rid of” or “working on” the ego seems foreign to them. They ask, “Is there any advantage in transcending the ego? How can it be beneficial to constantly look at my motives, my inner thoughts, the subtle undercurrents of my self-centeredness generated by my ego? What is the advantage of being egoless? Can I really gain anything by giving up looking out for Number One? Look around. How many people really want to give up their egos? I’ll be stupid if I do. I want to develop the strength of my ego, not reduce it.” This big ego show up at national level and brought national terrorism. Buddhism teaches non-self. Supreme selflessness builds tremendous strength, joy and courage. But it terrifies every bit of egotism left inside people. All their identity, proud, superiority are all dependent on this big ego. There is no wonder Buddha’s teaching of non-self goes head to head to western culture and root cause of many social issues/diseases.
Buddhism is about transformation of the mind. Buddha prescribed 84000 dharma doors, a number to describe the innumerable paths/cures to help the sentient beings crossover. And there are many different school of practices for the practitioner. But whatever school you subscribe into, Buddha said all dharma doors are equally good. There is no superior or inferior ways as long as it bring you enlightenment. Of course in Buddhism practices there are levels of kindergarten, elementary school, high school and graduate schools. Do you practices the dharma with a mind of self benefiting only, or to benefit your community, or to benefit the greater world, no matter how high level the dharma door is, the result is what you mind cultivate. The scope of your mindset determines the scope of your achievement. That is why there are bad people who claim studying Buddhism and turn out as a villain, and there are good people who claim they do not study Buddhism and do great things for society. The motivation， intention in the mind is what counts. “What you think you create, what you feel you attract, what you imagine you become.” 若人欲了知，三世一切佛。应观法界性，一切唯心造。
Many people learn Buddhism with the mindset of superstition as they pray Buddha for helping them get upper hand in wealth, social status, good luck in children and marriage, longevity. They did not realize they themselves need to put in effort for those gains. Those auspicious results are combination of many factors including the merits of their mind yoga in resonance with Buddha and Bodhisattvas. There was once a Brahman actually met Shiva in person and he plead Shiva to grant him good fortune. Shiva replied that he has no reason to grant special perks, but suggest to the Brahman to help build temples to accumulate his merits. 《地藏經》刷新你的認知. 求福報求智慧，不是簡單唸佛誦經便可得！学习地藏菩萨的无私，付出，孝顺. Learning Ksitigarbha Sutra is to learn about compassion and empathy. Through the stories of Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva, Buddha showed us the way to cultivate our meritis, grow wisdom, practice proper conduct in our daily life, repense wrong doing/thought, and eventually attain enlightenment. Ksitigarbha is a great role model of devotion and altruism. The essence of Mahayana Buddhism is to help the sentient beings as the path. 欲为诸佛龙象，先做牛马众生。大乘佛教的根本精神：唯有普度众生，方能最终成佛。
Another misconception is that concern of recital The Original Sutra of Earth Store will attract ghost. That is totally nonsense. Some chapters talked about the hell in vivid, is to teach people about the cause and condition of our actions, the cause and effect law. 唸誦《地藏經》會找鬼？看完佛陀的話你再評論！ The whole sutra describe a much celebrated gathering with Shakyamuni Buddha teaching about Earth Store Bodhisattva’s merits, and how different levels of practitioners can cultivate their spiritual practices by learning and paying tributes to Earth Store Bodhisattva.
Against such heavy head wind like that of Hurricane Ian to Florida of deep rooted western ego, no wonder Buddha’s dharma has distorted into meditation Buddhism, Buddhist modernism and Protestant Buddhism etc in the United States. The history of western rise still poisoned the western mind deluded them as the superior race, giving them the justification of colonization and exploitation without any moral repenance. To this day, people who stand for White Supremacy like Donald Trump refused to apologize for their crime against native America. Ironically, now they are calling Russia’s conflict with Ukraine as invasion.
Ann Gleig is an associate professor of religion and cultural studies at the University of Central Florida. Her American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity is highly informative in understanding the current state of the affairs of “modern Buddhism” as taking shape in the US. In this engaging and thoughtful study, Ann Gleig asks challenging and important questions about the limits of modern Buddhism and the future of the tradition in the United States. In her comprehensive scholarly and ethnographic study of current trends in meditation-based convert Buddhist groups in North America, Gleig shows us how Buddhism is moving into the US and how it’s impacting culture, and its current state filled with contradictions and a growing awareness of its own internal problems. Ann Gleig makes a compelling case that Western Buddhism, as it currently exists in America, is anything but immature and undeveloped. On the contrary, in the relatively brief half century of its presence here, Buddhism has already passed through two important transformative stages – the first mostly completed, and the second well under way but still in process. Here is an review by one of the readers:
The first transformation has its origins not in Buddhism’s migration to the West, but rather in colonialism’s intrusion into the East. Gleig contends, convincingly, that the British and other European colonizers exerted a subtle but powerful influence on the traditional Buddhism being practiced in India, by virtue of their forceful introduction of Enlightenment values into the native culture. This colonial culture gave rise to the radically new idea of meditation as the pursuit of individual wellbeing, rather than an expression of community among individuals following shared traditions and rituals. It was this novel Enlightenment-based approach to mindfulness that was taught to the American students who arrived in India in the late 1960s to learn meditation from “traditional” masters. When these students returned to America in the 1970s to pass along what they had learned on their pilgrimages to the East, they were in fact spreading modern, not traditional, Buddhism.
While the modernism of Western Buddhism may have its infant roots in the post-colonial culture of the East, its growth and maturity are firmly rooted in contemporary America. Here, over the past four decades, Buddhism has attracted a mostly white, mostly well-educated, mostly well-to-do group of practitioners – overwhelmingly liberal in their political sympathies, devoted to European Enlightenment ideals of science and reason, and drawn to the psychotherapeutic benefits of mindfulness. Gleig refers to this meditation-centered, mostly secular, and highly psychologized version that has become the dominant form of Buddhist practice in America as “convert Buddhism”, underscoring the deep divide between it and the more traditional forms of Buddhism still practiced in the West by what she terms “the immigrant community” of mostly Asian-American, usually more religious, and generally less well-to-do practitioners.
This first transformative stage of Western Buddhism into its modernist form is now largely complete, but the split just described between “convert” and “immigrant” communities has laid the groundwork for a second, more dramatic transformation which is just getting started. It is this second wave of transformation that Gleig’s research has detected, and that defines the core thesis of American Dharma. Gleig proposes that the characteristics of “Buddhist modernism” – firmly established by the success of the convert communities in the first wave of transformation – are now, in response both to internal pressures building within the convert communities themselves and to external forces occurring in American culture, entering upon a state of radical transformation into what she designates as an emerging form of “postmodern Buddhism”.
In three key chapters in the first half of her book, Gleig examines three different manifestations of the impact of modernist American culture on convert Buddhism – the secular mindfulness movement, the sexual revolution and its attendant abuses, and the growing confluence of psychotherapy and meditation. Here she shows how this modernist form of American Buddhism, with its predominantly white culture and its primary focus on individual wellbeing, contains within itself the seeds of the diversity challenges – both racial and generational – that are opening the doors to a variety of postmodernist trends. Her detailed account of how one such community in the convert lineage has struggled valiantly, but ultimately in vain, to overcome the racial divide between its majority white membership and its minority persons-of-color group is heartbreaking to read.
In the second half of the book, Gleig switches focus away from the modernist communities and their leadership, and toward the voices and the projects of the emerging postmodernist influencers in the American Buddhist community. Once again, three key chapters explore in depth three significant developments – the emergence of a radically new emphasis on social and racial justice as a necessary component of Buddhist practice, the growing popularity of online communities and social media networks with younger practitioners, and the tensions brewing between the aging “boomer” generation of teachers and the much younger “Gen X” teachers getting ready to assume leadership roles as the boomers begin to retire.
As she documents each of these manifestations of postmodernist challenges to the existing modernist ideals, Gleig is careful to point out how these new developments should be seen as simultaneous continuations of, and corrections to, the established forms of convert Buddhism. Her message is that Buddhism in America is growing into postmodernity; it is not being overthrown and reborn into something radically new and unfamiliar. It’s an evolution, not a revolution.
And yet, a careful reading of American Dharma leaves one with a palpable sense that Western Buddhism is, at this particular moment in the United States, experiencing severe growing pains that make its future at best unpredictable, and at worst unsustainable. Especially in the latter half of the book, Gleig necessarily devotes a significantly larger portion of her narrative to the postmodernist developments – this is, after all, the story she has set herself to tell in support of her thesis. For readers whose practice has been grounded for many years in the modernist tradition, it’s easy to feel unsettled, as if we are being completely overlooked, or even worse, being altogether set aside – in the gloomy metaphor of one longtime Zen teacher and blogger, “like a dinosaur”.
But perhaps the better perspective for us “dinosaurs” to hold as we read this book is one of appreciation for Gleig’s in-depth reporting on the various post-modernist trends impacting contemporary Western Buddhism. By letting us more clearly “see things as they really are” – a hallmark of wisdom in the Buddhist teachings – American Dharma can help us to respond more skillfully to the changes that are all but certain to come.
Buddhism was quickly assimilated into Chinese culture because it share many common thread with Confucianism and Daoism which are the two local ideologies of ancient China. And because of fertile land of Confucianism in advocating the devotion, service and altruism as the path of Dao, Mahayana Buddhism was integrated into Chinese culture with relative easy transition. And Buddhism ushered in pinnacles of Tang Dynasty, one of the most celebrated period of civilization in China. Still there were over one hundred years of debates and heated discussion among the practitioners. What is going to happen in United States? It certainly takes time and effort to cultivate wisdom and self-awareness. But as long as the big ego having an ignorant prejudice like Why Buddhism and the Modern World Need Each Other, it will not happen. Their mentality paragraphs into an attitude of “Buddha and Western Civilization need each other” – do you see how ridiculous this is ? In a not so exact metaphor, we ask, how is a turtle compare to the ocean?
In summary, Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva is known for his vows to take responsibility for the instruction of all beings in the six worlds between the pass away of Sakyamuni Buddha and the rise of Maitreya, as well as to not achieve Buddhahood until all hells are emptied. Here are the main points of take-away for our study of the Ksitigarbha Sutra.
