04 Jan 2012 – Celebrating Warriors in the World

The Sakyong continues to encourage us to view our centres and our offerings as more than meditation training, but as a complete social vision uniting the depth of spiritual practice and the concrete possibilities for sanity, compassion, sustainability, and justice in society. With this view, the leadership of all Shambhala Centres and Groups, who are so inspired, have been invited to choose an evening to celebrate, remember, and contemplate the inspiration of previous warriors who have done their part in revealing compassion, wisdom, and justice in society. This will begin the creation of Shambhala community events on the theme “Celebrating Warriors in the World.”

An existing holiday celebrating such warriors (for example, in the United States, the week of Martin Luther King Day, 16-22 January 2012) could be an appropriate time, or any date that works best for local communities. During this evening the topic for the open house or other public offering will be exemplary warriors throughout history -­ those women and men who have demonstrated bravery and compassion in service to humankind and the planet.

This year, rather than suggesting new events or programs, the proposal is to invite a teacher who is inspired and skilled in discussing life examples of warriorship to lead an already-scheduled open house or other public gathering. If many of our centres around the world chose to participate in ways that suit their cultures, perhaps on individuals from their nations or communities, it could be most powerful.

For example, talks might be on: Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi, Wangari Maathai, Nelson Mandela, Harvey Milk, William Wilberforce, etc.

The talks could cover Shambhala’s vision of creating enlightened society; our personal training, bravery, and compassionate action in the world which connect with a vast social vision; specific life stories, teachings, and experiences of a warrior in the world, from any tradition; and what we can learn from such a person about the meaning of warriorship, being a bodhisattva, and creating enlightened society.

Language and teachings from the Shambhala Lineage Festival, and from the Enlightened Society Vow, could be helpful in expressing this vision. If most centres offer a talk in relation to this topic, it would be excellent. If centres wish, more could be done with physical, artistic, and electronic postings,­ photo exhibits, presentations on local warriors, etc. In future years, we aspire to offer a “Celebrating Warriors in the World Week.”

Yours in the Vision of Enlightened Society,

Adam Lobel, Kalapa Acharya
Mary Whetsell, Chair of Societal Health and Well Being
Debbie Coats, Desung Arm Commander
Charlene Leung, Shastri, Chair of the Diversity Working Group

(This announcement was from the Shambhala News Service)

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Mark Hazell markhazell45@gmail.com via list.shambhala.org to sangha-announce
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Following up on the today’s news bulletin, I thought people might be interested to know that Shastri Rebecca Hazell is the author of a trilogy of books for young readers on genuine heroes and heroines. These books were the fruit of her recognition that people throughout the ages and from every culture have risen to the challenge, whose lives were and are expressions of the very best of humanity. All of these books are available from Amazon in Canada, the U.S.A., and the U.K. — they are all currently out of print, but both new and used copies are showing as being available. Even though they were intended for a relatively young audience, they are wonderful resources and beautiful books.

Mark Hazell
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You sometimes get that hit on drala I think after your practice thats what I have somewhat noticed in the sense that there seems to be a quality of clarity and fullness to your actions in the world, yes too that could be there all the time but for me recently I have noticed that after practice. Thats why in some respects people can not give up practicing I think because now they have kind of tasted that fullness. So some times when you go in a shrine room it is quite an inviting atmosphere if you are not raggedy tired during a programme.

I suppose it is like the Regent said your mind goes to the teachings because of the brilliant luminosity of them -check out the utube clip of him and his Q and As with students in various programmes which explain this -quite stunning!

Best Rita Ashworth

Rita, drala isn’t a concept.

It’s something for you to explore personally, experientially.

Good luck!

Re your post I do find it very interesting and I do find you posting on this site very welcome with the SB point of view one may say.

However,(!) re the comment of calling down ethereal beings to your shrine I am not sure where you are coming from with that statement. I dont think logically re the shambhala teachings you can call down anything from ‘up’ there, rather it seems to me that that concept of power pervades our mundane existence and we are not separate from it, hence Mr Perks stories about Trungpa Rinpoche visiting different dimensions for want of a better word.

So if drala is not present at this very moment it is a false ‘concept’ I think –it must be everpresent as is indeed the ‘ethereal beings’ who I think logically must come in different forms to the culture and consciousness of the environment you are in. Maybe another reason why CTR left the whole thing wide open

Re the religious viewpoint and the secular viewpoint –yes this is the great bugbear of the west at the present time and does seem to many in the west to be a mad argument that we should not be getting involved in because surely to them the secular view point is predominant and true –the reliance on scientific method. However myself yes I too believe that the world we are living in is sacred, but an awareness of that can come also from secular reasoning which clears the decks of obfuscation and leads us into the ‘experience’ of the sacred – so it is a process of uncovering ourselves from our masks that we put on in society and of course the emergence from the cocoon. This is why the shambhala teachings have the intellectual rigour of many western philosophical traditions. And to me personally I think the engagement in the next few decades with the shambhala teachings for a lot of people will be coming from the ‘secular’ viewpoint through Art and other similar disciplines perhaps yoga for example.

Indeed in the west there are many reports of secular people engaging with what is termed the ‘religious’ experience from a non-religious background -one only has to look at the numerous articles about this in connection to peoples experience of coming back from the death state after a heart attack. Maybe there has been much media emphasis on these areas of life/death because people are indeed looking for a way to make sense of their lives without a need for a hierarchical organisation. Historically this is supposedly what happened too, according to Trevor Ling –a noted Buddhist scholar, in sixth century India when sociologically it was a time when the middle classes were emerging and they had the time to reflect on such things.

In addition there are points of contact with conventional religion with the shambhala teachings such as Christianity who talk of Christ being alive in our present workaday lives so for the life of me truly this is what CTR was pointing at aswell the inseparability of our mundane world with the sacred and Christians have been going on about this for ages –so the reawakened knowledge in their own contemplative tradition also reflects that meditation of some description will increase in the Christian churches. For that conversation to be limited by SB into the teachings meant for everyone and now only for Buddhists is to me a rejection of the Others experience of the divine or the Sacred as we term it in shambhala.

So yes yet again lets have the teachings for everyone in their entirety and let them flood all traditions so much.

Well I think that is all

Best from this side of the pond

Rita Ashworth

Likewise in Buddhism, we have this idea sometimes that only Buddhists know anything. So if CTR, or, say, Marpa, had previous lifetimes on earth before he became a Buddhist, he must have have been ignorant in those lifetimes, by this logic.

Maybe it’s blasphemous to say this, but I think that kind of reasoning is silly. I think the unverse is much bigger than that.

I think what it comes down to is that we feel we have no ground, which absolutely terrifies us, and then we come up with explanations and twisted logic of all sorts to fill up our cocoon and make us feel better about it all….

We’re just like the guy wandering around after death, who desperately reaches for a womb to take shelter in…. Oh, that’s better– something familiar and cozy to flop in!

No…Buddhists don’t have a hedge on enlightenment. What was the name of that Hopi? Joe? I believe VCTR said something to the effect that all he needed to know was a few Buddhist concepts (help me here) and he would be enlightened..

In fact, there are a couple of stories about people Rinpoche ran into (one was at at talk he gave in New York, one was a disgusting drunk in a gutter in London) that he said were enlightened. Sorry

Yes, that could be.

However, probably there are many Hindus who believe that Buddhism wouldn’t exist without a Hindu framework. Buddhists borrowed the concept of meditation and many specific types of meditation directly from Hinduism. For that matter, the Buddha was a Hindu! And he had Hindu teachers, who perhaps had their own Hindu lineages? (The Buddha certainly was not a “Buddhist”.) And a lot of the Sanscrit terminology used in Buddhism is taken straight from Hinduism, including words like “sadhana”, the concept of vows, and so on.

There was already some relatively nontheistic branches of Hinduism, “advaita vedanta” for instance. So maybe Buddhism is just one more type of Hinduism. a somewhat chauvenistic branch, one that looks down on the rest of the world?

Of course, I’m being facetious here. Personally I give the Buddha complete permission to have created his own separate “thing”, without all Buddhists having to also declare themselves as members of Hinduism.

Likewise, if the great realizer Chogyam Trugnpa Rinpoche wanted to be the first Sakyong of a new tradition he was revealing, which is based on wisdom found in many traditions from around the world, then I don’t have a problem with that either.

I’ve spoken to Buddhists who feel differently however, and who’ve told me that because CTR was a Buddhist, everything he did was to be owned and controlled by the hierarchy of Tibetan lamas. I’m not kidding someone said that right to my face, which was kind of refreshing. It was a Caucasian chap who said he did his daily devotions in Tibetan. I appreciated his coming right out and saying that plainly.

It seems like SMR’s students are aligning themselves more and more with that view…?

As far as CTR’s use of the term “secular”… I could be wrong but I think it’s supposed to mean that the enlightened society is big enough to have room for many different religions.

Are Native Americans bereft of warrior wisdom? Are Buddhists always braver than other people? Do Buddhists have a monopoly on wisdom, on basic goodness?

These are good questions to ask ourselves, maybe.

Trungpa Rinpoche knew this well enough and comments on it in the Kalapa Assembly transcripts (one of the later ones, can’t remember which). The issue of “secular” always meant that there was no need to divide everything up into here’s the priestly hierarchy and here’s the unwashed rest of the universe, here’s the holy shrine and there’s the fallen world of creation, here’s the holy religious observance and there’s people going to work and washing the dishes. The point all along of “secularism” in Shambhala was that it didn’t make distinctions in its view of sacredness–it’s all sacred, we all have basic goodness, whoever we are, and there’s nothing that we do that doesn’t fall inside that sacredness, no matter how externally “secular” it may seem.

Trunpga Rinpoche used language in unusual ways, and this is one of them. Much of the argument people make on this site seems to be based in thinking that somehow Shambhala is non-religious, whereas it was always an encompassing religiosity that saw everything as included in that, whatever form of life you might be living. At the same time, it has very specific practices for actualizing that view, ones that wouldn’t exist without a Buddhist framework, that’s always been a part of Trungpa Rinpoche’s Shambhala teachings: including shamatha, egolessness, bodhichitta, space, tathagatgarbha,mandala, refuge and bodhisattva vows, the structure of sadhanas, lots of things like that are inherent in Shambhala, but reconstituted, refreshed, reordered, re-envisioned. It’s neither straight Buddhism as has been developed in the past, nor is it some completely other thing. If this could be recognized, it would help a lot in understanding clearly what Sakyong Mipham has done to develop these teachings and their presentation.