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BSPG News and Meeting (No. 206)
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Edited by Stony Brook Buddhism Study and Practice Group

News
1. The date for the Hauppauge High School Multi Faith Festival has been changed to Monday, February 3, from 7:30 am. to 2:00 pm. Zen Buddhist display table need your help to demonstrate "Zen Meditation" and help out students with Q/A. Direction: Take LIE to Exit 56 (Route 111). Take Route 111 North to the next major intersection (about 2 miles) with Route 454. Turn right onto Route 454 and go to the next traffic light (Lincoln Boulevard, about 1/4 mile). Make a left hand turn to Lincoln Blvd and take the second entrance on the left to the school.
2. We have put together a webpage that contains more information about the upcoming monthly talk by David Berman. It includes links to some article written by him. The URL is: http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/monthly/talk200302.html
3. We have received only one feedback regarding a few questions posted by a reader. We would like to renew our invitation for your participation: "In the newsletter we sent before the winter break, we wished you a merry Christmas and a happy new year. A reader responded with the following questions:  I'd like to know in what sense I should enagage in merrymaking? Is that not also a karmic-inducing attachment? Also, how can one celebrate Christmas at the same time as having the true dharma-mind? We would like to hear of your thoughts regarding these questions since they touch on some very important issues concerning the practice of Buddhism as well as the appreciation and understanding of other religions. Please send your comments to buddhism@ic.sunysb.edu. We will collect your opinions and publish a summary in a forthcoming newsletter. Your participation is highly appreciated."

Meeting
Thursday, 1/30/2003, 7pm to 8:30pm
Room 305, Student Activities Center
Please be on time!

Words from the Suttas/Sutras
"When great enlightening beings dedicate roots of goodness, they think in these terms: 'By my roots of goodness may all creatures, all sentient beings, be purified, may they be filled with virtues which cannot be runined and are inexhaustible. May they always gain respect. May they have right mindfulness and unfailing recollection. May they attain sure discernment. May they be replete with immeasurable knowledge. May all virtues of physical, verbal, and mental action fully adorn them.'" -- Avatamsaka Sutra, Ten Dedications.

Quote of the Week
"What we're talking about is getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking it right in the eye -- not as a way to solve problem, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking. The truth is that when we really begin to do this, we are going to be continuously humbled. There is not going to be much room for the arrogance that holding on to ideals can bring. The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by our own courage to step forward a little further. The kinds of discoveries that are made through practice have nothing to do in believeing in anything. They have much more to do with having the courage to die, the courage to die continually." --Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Resistance (excerpt)
by David Berman
(Originally published in the Chan Magazine. Used with permission)

At the age of ten, I had four impacted molars removed; what I remember most vividly is my struggle against the anesthesia. It's not that I wanted to experience the surgery but that fighting the loss of consciousness seemed the most natural thing to do. I did it spontaneously, just as I would have struggled against drowning, and when I regained consciousness, it was from a dream of struggle that I awoke. I took the experience as a failure, both of awareness and of will, and sometime during the next few weeks I conceived the following fantasy: if at the moment of death one can remain clear, can remain aware of whatever that transition is, then the self that is so aware can remain intact and persist, but if at that moment one panics, or struggles, or even blinks, then oblivion is certain.

As a young actor beginning my career, I got a piece of advice from an older colleague. He pointed out a somewhat sentimental performance that neither of us liked and said that many actors, when asked to play a strong emotion, make the mistake of doing so and that this produces one-dimensional portrayals of humanity. When real people experience strong emotion, he said, most of them resist it, and it is their very struggle that expresses the emotion's power. Unless you want to appear as a self-indulgent neurotic, he said, don't act the emotion, act the resistance.

Now, although this advice proved to have its limitations as far as acting was concerned, it also had a certain wisdom, for following it not only produced an effective imitation of emotional distress, it produced the emotions themselves. I found that I only had to put myself on guard and, sure enough, the very emotion I was prepared to resist would rise as if to the challenge. But that made me wonder, resistance is completely counterproductive, why do people do it? This latter memory strums the chord of the former and of so many memories in between that I have spent the last week writing up and tossing out memories. I've had trouble choosing among them because they're all relevant to the story I'm trying to tell: they're all memories of struggle, of opposition, of resistance. I was in fact a member of "the opposition" committed to the civil rights "struggle" and to war and draft "resistance" and would have fiercely opposed the suggestion, had I heard it then, that there might be a form of advocacy or, more generally, of doing good, that does not involve setting oneself in opposition.

But it is also true that I spent much time and energy fruitlessly opposing that which was not a question of conscience and in which no lives were at stake. Among my greatest opponents have been my body, my hair, my job, my leisure, sleep, wakefulness, noise, silence, traffic, weather, the words of others, and time, both its speed and its slowness. Who would ever have thought that I might learn to make peace with such intractable foes by making a study of fighting?

I'm being disingenuous. I am a teacher of Wu Mei Pai, the "Five Plum School" of Chinese martial art, and calling it the study of fighting is like calling the Zen school the study of sitting, notwithstanding that a Zen adept can outsit most anyone. As my teacher said the day I began my training, kung-fu is not the Study of conflict, but of conflict resolution. At the time, he was talking about fighting efficiently, but over the years I have come to see that the study of conflict resolution is the study of the self in the world, and that this is the Study of how all things return to the one, and that this is the practice of Ch'an.

(to read the rest of the article, please visit: http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/monthly/talk200302.html

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