Words. Many amuse. Most forgotten. But some seed into life’s philosophy. I share this record because I have been drifting further apart in world view, from my loved ones and the people around me. A difference in influences, perceptions, circumstances and reactions, maybe ? If I can get you to take a look at the seeds, maybe we can have better conversations about the wild flowers ?
“Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. “
OpEd on Nytimes by John Lewis
On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.
Same species, same earth, different stories. Like creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by then no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a co-creator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.
And then they met – the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve – and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echos of our stories.
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“From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the “gift” is deemed to be “free” because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in a gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a “bundle of rights”. whereas in gift economy property has a “bundle of responsibilities” attached.
Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
NOVELTY VS. ORIGINALITY
“For us, a work of originality is not creating something that no one has done before,” says Lisa DeLong, who manages the school’s outreach efforts. “It’s about going to the origins of that craft.” To explain, DeLong suggested imagining a design that’s based on a lotus blossom. “The point is not to show a new way to draw a Lotus,” she told me. “It’s to ask yourself, what is the essence of lotus-ness?”
Prince Charles Redefines Originality
Luxury fashion’s love of hierarchies has never been subtle. Telling people what they should look like often also requires telling them what’s unacceptable: To spend money on feeling better, people first need to feel bad. For decades, the industry tolerated nearly no dark skin, fat bodies, wrinkles, or outward indications that a person wasn’t summoned from the recesses of a French executive’s brain and manifested directly onto the banquette at a SoHo restaurant. Any criticisms, the industry shrugged off.
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Suddenly, though, it’s the worst time to be peddling European elitism since the French Revolution. As the United States has roiled with soaring unemployment, mass death, and protests against racist state violence, fashion has had to contend with accusations that it long refused to dignify with a response.
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But in fashion, envisioning a path forward is particularly complicated. The veneration of whiteness and wealth isn’t merely incidental to the global fashion business, but central to its vision and embedded in its practices, from who gets hired to how things get marketed. Luxury fashion is built on the emotional scaffolding of human aspiration—what happens to the industry when everyone gets sick of worshipping rich white people?
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For brands that have clung to fashion’s ingrained elitism, she thinks it might be too late to save them: “If you systematically created your business with the intent of celebrating certain ideals, and everything has been built on that structure, then it’s rotted from the root.”
Fashion’s Racism and Classism are going out of Style, The Atlantic. RIP my worship of the French chic and European elitism in general. I can’t bear it.
The question that arises is–“Did the Buddha have no Social Message?”
17. When pressed for an answer, students of Buddhism refer to the two points. They say–
18. “The Buddha taught Ahimsa.”
19. “The Buddha taught peace!”
20. Asked, “Did the Buddha give any other Social Message?”
21. “Did the Buddha teach justice?”
22. “Did the Buddha teach love?”
23. “Did the Buddha teach liberty?”
24. “Did the Buddha teach equality?”
25. “Did the Buddha teach fraternity?”
26. “Could the Buddha answer Karl Marx?”
27. These questions are hardly ever raised in discussing the Buddha’s Dhamma.
My answer is that the Buddha has a Social Message. He answers all these questions. But they have been buried by modern authors.
§ 2. The Buddha’s Own Classification
1. The Buddha adopted a different classification of Dhamma.
2. The first category he called Dhamma.
3. He created a new category called Not-Dhamma (Adhamma) though it went by the name of Dhamma.
4. He created a third category which he called Saddhamma.
5. The third category was another name for Philosophy of Dhamma.
6. To understand His Dhamma one must understand all the three–Dhamma, Adhamma, and Saddhamma.
Ambedkar, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji. The Buddha & His Dhamma.
Buddhism is a spiritual school that could be a good fit for me. Except for the absorption of some beliefs/superstitions of the societies it evolved though. Except for too much emphasis on the self and not enough on the system. Dont fret about things that are outside your control but be good, they seem to say. Keep working on self, they seem to say. What good is keeping the peace if it’s keeping the status quo alive. What good is it if my closet is tidy but the landfills are bursting to the seams ? What good is my house in order, while I watch the world slowly burn ? Cleaning my house IS NOT ENOUGH for me. A better fit : secular interpretation of Buddhism by Dr. Ambedkar, a Dalit. Dalits are an oppressed class in the Indian society and continue to face grave injustices. They never had the privilege of staying home, only working on spirituality of self and waiting for the system to reform at its own pace (if it ever will). It’s a matter of life and death. Dr. Ambedkar’s interpretation of Buddhism can aid the environmentalists and social justice workers.