Open Buddha

It is now January 1^st, 2012 so I suppose it is time for year end (beginning?) review and announcements.

For the most part, this has not been a year of changes. I've been at Mozilla for four and a half years, working with the seminary for the past few years (first as a student and now as an instructor), been in the same house, married to the same wonderful woman, and running the same hackerspace.

This year I turned 40, which is considered to be entering mid-life by some. It really doesn't feel much different than 30 except I'm, perhaps, wiser or at least more aware of what an idiot I can be. I think that is all we can really hope for with "maturity" anyway. I do find it true that our conception of ourselves seems to freeze sometime between 25 and 30. It isn't that we aren't constantly changing as people still (nothing is constant except change, after all) but the shorthand we use to view ourselves is still that person we thought we were when we were that age. It could be different with others but, based on talking to people and what people have written in books and whatnot about themselves, I think this is a common feature. So, I'm old enough to know better, not that old still, but have to remind myself I'm not quite that loud-mouth I was when I got divorced in my late 20's.

This is where I will announce, beyond Twitter and Facebook, that my work is changing. I've been doing Quality Assurance ("Software Testing") since 1996 with the exception of a six month stint with a generic "Project Manager" title right before I left Microsoft in 2006. For most of the last four and a half years, I've run the QA side of security updates for Mozilla Firefox. This has meant triaging incoming bugs with devs and others, verifying fixes, and generally making sure the updates don't destroy your computer or the usability of Firefox. Right now, I'm officially in transition to leave QA and to join Mozilla's Security Team as a program manager. My duties at this point appear to likely focus on communications with various parties, such as bug reporters, looking at incoming issues, and helping out other Security Team members on wrangling projects. This is a pretty natural transition given that I've been working with much of the team for years and I'm likely reporting to one of my triaging partners. Obviously, lifewise, this is a big change as I'll be leaving QA after 15 years for a new career shift into program and project management. Given the intersection of my work at Mozilla and helping found and run a hackerspace, this feels very "right" to me and organic as an evolution of what I'm doing and the space in which I wish to work.

Speaking of the hackerspace, Ace Monster Toys continues to do well. We're up to about 30 paying members (+/-2) with a few more coming to events and meetings that are not members. We're in the process of finishing our federal nonprofit paperwork in the next few weeks (we're a California nonprofit right now). We had tables at the main Maker Faire and the local East Bay Mini Maker Faire this year and got a lot of attention at these. We were on the Make Live Hackerspace Roadshow with a video we made giving a tour of the space. The goals for this year are to have more regular workshops and classes for the public and to generally grow the membership.

Within the Buddhist side of things, I've been fairly busy. The Five Mountain Buddhist Seminary went through a name change within the last two months, becoming the Prajna Institute for Buddhist Studies, to help differentiate ourselves as a non-denominational Mahayana Buddhist seminary from our Five Mountain Zen lineage. We continue to pull in a few new students on a regular basis and we're examining how to increase our offerings and improve what we already have. I continue to teach a few classes every quarter, working with something like eight students on average.

My primary Buddhist teacher and the head of the institute, Rev. Jiun Foster, received Inga (Inka) this last week, recognizing his accomplishments and realization as a Zen teacher. As part of this, his Dharma name was changed to "Myo Gak" (or "Myogak") by his teacher, Rev. Paul Yuanzhi Lynch. Not directly related to this but associated with ongoing developments in our Zen work, I've received a new Dharma name as well, which is "Ji Gong" (Jigong), written in Chinese as "智空," and meaning "Wisdom of Emptiness" (or is it "Empty of Wisdom" as the joke goes). This is because I've been appointed Dogam or Vice-Abbot of Great Cloud Zen Society, of which more details will eventually be forthcoming. This is based off of Rev. Myogak's work in Cincinnati over the last five or so years and will be an evolution of our continuing Zen work.

I've also begun to hold open Buddhist retreats in the Bay Area under the moniker of "Open Sangha." I held a two day retreat in November and have begun scheduling monthly one day retreats starting this month. As I say on the site, "The Bay Area Open Sangha exists to allow people to practice and study the Buddhadharma, the teachings of the Buddha, without concern for sectarianism or the historical lines between traditions of Buddhism." The retreats are a place for people to practice meditation, usually sitting and walking forms, without being tied to a specific school or tradition of practice. I realized that there are already quite a few Zen, Vipassana, and other groups in the Bay Area (and elsewhere) but few that allow Buddhists of all traditions of practice to come together. I feel that this is a useful space in which to work as I really question the value of too much sectarianism within Buddhism, though I do agree with the value of learning a coherent tradition of practice.

On a personal front at home, my wife, Rebecca, and I continue to do well. We've both embarked on a variety of fitness focused routines during the last year (and some). Part of reaching 40, as a fellow priest pointed out, is realizing that you can wake up in the morning having hurt yourself in bed without doing more than sleeping. Working a rather sedentary job (technology) combined with sedentary habits like reading, writing, and meditation, it is easy to just begin (continue?) to physically fall apart. I seem to have made a successful transition in the last year and a half to being a bit of a jock. I work out with a trainer once a week, do at least two cardio routines every week, and lift weights four or more days a week. Basically, I now work out almost every day compared to never working out or getting any exercise as recently as two or three years ago. A year ago, my trainer, who is a competition Olympic style weightlifter, taught my how to lift weights, which is something I'd never learned as a young geek who avoided the jocks at the gym. My garage is now filled with multiple lifting racks, two olympic barbells, and about 500 pounds of free weights (plus some dumbbells and a range of kettlebells up to 53 pounds). It is amazing the amount of difference working our daily has made in my energy levels and my outlook on life. I feel strange now if I don't work out on a given day for at least an hour and feel a sense of accomplishment in my gradually increasing ability to bench press, deadlift, or otherwise lift heavy things. On the other hand, I've hurt myself pretty well a couple of times being ambitious but, given my age and habits, I really do need to work to be healthy.

Additionally, in October I had LASIK surgery on my eyes, which Rebecca had done about four years ago. While it took a month to fully heal (and aspects of it are still healing and adjusting), it has been a life changer. Having worn glasses since I was twelve, it is hard to impart how incredible it is to have at least 20/20 vision and to be free to run around without glasses. To any of my glasses wearing friends, I cannot recommend the procedure highly enough if you qualify. It is easily the best money I've spent in years for the most return. As it turns out, I'm only a couple of years away from needing reading glasses, which this doesn't help, but in all other respects, I have perfect vision now. (I also had new portraiture work done by a photographer friend, to commemorate having no glases anymore and thus changing my appearance.)

In summary (for the "too long, didn't read" crowd), I have a new job at Mozilla, am still running a hackerspace, and have a new ordained name. I'm also running retreats open to anyone in the Bay Area, teaching in a Buddhist seminary, and lifting a lot of heavy things often. I must say that turning 40 has been a lot better, a lot more even, than turning 30 was by any estimation. This last year has been good overall and I hope that this coming year is even better.

I just read a recent interview with Hakim Bey today, In Conversation with Hakim Bey done by Hans Ulrich Obrist from e-flux.

As many of my friends know, I ran one of the longest running Hakim Bey sites for many years on hermetic.com before I gave the site away to a new curator. Back in my undergrad days in the early 1990's, I was the person that (with permission) reformatted Bey's T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism for posting on Usenet, the old discussion forum sort of area on the early Internet. I have been very influenced by his thought at various points in my life, even as I moved beyond my earlier enthusiasms (and despite the personal controversies around Hakim Bey).

I noticed in the interview that Obrist asked Bey about the origins of T.A.Z. and I thought it worth quoting. It was interesting to read (as was the whole interview).

I'm not sure when in 2011 that it was done but I do find it interesting that nowhere in the discussion below does the Occupy Movement come up. Given its natural tendency to do so, I suspect that this interview was done early in the year before it became much of a well known phenomena, especially since Bey is in the Hudson Valley in New York. I'm kind of curious as to what he would say about it.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: I also wanted to ask you about the origins of T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, which is a book that changed the way I approached exhibitions when I began working as a curator. Growing up with this idea that the exhibition has a master plan and the curator is the one who does a checklist, reading T.A.Z. for the first time in the early ‘90s really triggered a whole set of exhibitions for us, like Life/Live, Cities on the Move, and Laboratorium. Most of my exhibitions in the ‘90s, and then also Utopia Station in the 2000s, relinquished the curatorial master plan in favor of being temporary autonomous zones in which we would basically invite collectives and artists to curate shows within the show. So for me it was a toolbox for curating, and I always wondered how you came to write that book, how its genesis came about?

Hakim Bey: Well, the real genesis was my connection to the communal movement in America, my experiences in the 1960s in places like Timothy Leary’s commune in Millbrook. And of course the main criticism of this activity is that it didn’t last. But these things tend to be very ephemeral—if a secular commune lasts in America for ten years, it’s a miracle. Usually only the religious ones last longer than a generation—and usually at the expense of becoming quite authoritarian, and probably dismal and boring as well. I’ve noticed that the exciting ones tend to disappear, and as I began to further study this phenomenon, I found that they tend to disappear in a year or a year and a half. In the ‘60s we had a lot of communes that lasted for a year and half, two, three years. I think the only one that survived was The Farm, and that’s due to a number of things that made it very different, such as the fact that it had what I would say was a rather authoritarian leader, Steve Gaskin. What a brilliant guy. I think the place held together because he was willing to be its leader. A lot of the other communes fell apart because they were so anarchistic that they had no leaders, and so nobody washed the dishes. The movement was still going on in the 1980s. I had friends who were deeply involved in intentional communities, and I myself got involved. And everybody in the ‘80s was giving a good deal of thought to the whole idea of what intentional community could mean and how it could improve your life to be in one, or if it even could at all. That was the question. I think it unquestionably does. People have great fun for at least a year or a year and a half, and then when the problems start, that’s usually when it breaks up. After thinking about that for a while, it occurred to me that, well, it’s not such a great tragedy that these things don’t last. You shouldn’t condemn the experience of the people at Brook Farm, for example, just because it only lasted a few years. Those people had an incredibly deep experience that changed their lives. They had fun while they were there. They had a more intense existence, with everything geared up to a higher charge. All you have to do is read a little Emerson and a little Thoreau, see what the people who visited Brook Farm had to say about it. It was buzzing with energy and good vibrations.

HUO: Emerson said, “Nothing great has ever been achieved without enthusiasm.”

HB: Exactly. So it occurred to me that you could make a virtue of the temporary nature of these things. If these organizations fall apart after eighteen months or so, well, let’s just plan on it. Let’s have these communities and say that they’re only going to last for a short while. And as soon as the intensity fades, then it’s over. It’s finished. We wrap it up, go somewhere else, do something new. But I also have to admit that by the 1980s, waiting for the revolution for thirty years had gotten a little tiresome. When I was really young and full of enthusiasm in the 1960s, we really, actually, sincerely believed that a major transformation was imminent. And as it turned out, we were all naïve, perhaps like those Christian fundamentalists who are so certain that the end of the world is imminent. I don’t know. It could have been a form of millenarian insanity, but we believed in it in any case. The older we got, the more this receded into history, at least for me. And for others it became a futile, youthful dream they had to give up. But I’m still working for that transformation, though I’m no longer convinced it’s around the corner, or that it’s going to happen in my lifetime. So as I began wondering how we could have a taste of revolutionary life without the revolution, since it was apparently not going to happen, this new Temporary Autonomous Zone seemed the only possible answer to that. There was no single moment of genesis really, but a whole series of light-saturated moments throughout American history—including the 1960s, which I had lived through myself—that all culminated in that theoretical work.

HUO*: So if one considers Temporary Autonomous Zones as these pockets of anarchy, do you find any now, in the twenty-first century? Where are they? Can they be expanded? And what forms do they take?

HB: Well, I’ve always said that I didn’t invent the TAZ. I just noticed that it existed. It’s always existed. For some reason, most people have to believe that what they’re doing is going to last forever in order to find the enthusiasm to do anything at all. The only thing that changed was thinking of the temporary itself as a possible good, instead of an obstacle. A good dinner party is a Temporary Autonomous Zone. Nobody tells you what to do at a good dinner party. Nobody gives orders. Nobody collects taxes. It’s an experience of giving and being given to, of filling the body and emptying the mind, having good conversation and good wine and so forth. This is already a TAZ, but you have to conceptualize it that way for it to be that way. It’s simply a matter of consciousness. But once you find that consciousness, the forms of organization begin to open up. You begin to see all the different forms of organization that this could take. It could be anything from a picnic by the riverside to a community that lasts for two years. Where is it actually happening? Well, I have to say that the current moment at the end of this decade is, to me, one of the low energy points of history. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I feel that it’s actually hard to find a good TAZ now. And it’s more important than ever to do so. One reason being that communism is no longer. We now live in the world of the triumph of capital. And in this world, it would seem that the TAZ is, perhaps, the last possible revolutionary form. I hope that’s not true, but it may be. Either way, the idea is certainly more important now than it was around 1989 when I dreamed the idea up in the first place.conversation and good wine and so forth. This is already a TAZ, but you have to conceptualize it that way for it to be that way. It’s simply a matter of consciousness. But once you find that consciousness, the forms of organization begin to open up. You begin to see all the different forms of organization that this could take. It could be anything from a picnic by the riverside to a community that lasts for two years. Where is it actually happening? Well, I have to say that the current moment at the end of this decade is, to me, one of the low energy points of history. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I feel that it’s actually hard to find a good TAZ now. And it’s more important than ever to do so. One reason being that communism is no longer. We now live in the world of the triumph of capital. And in this world, it would seem that the TAZ is, perhaps, the last possible revolutionary form. I hope that’s not true, but it may be. Either way, the idea is certainly more important now than it was around 1989 when I dreamed the idea up in the first place.

Digital Dharma

Staff for the documentary, Digital Dharma, contacted me the other day about their upcoming film. Coincidentally, a day later, Kickstarter let me know about this film because it also has an ongoing kickstarter drive going to raise money to finish the film. Between the two of these, I thought it especially timely to talk to people about Digital Dharma, in order to help see the film fully realized.

I was told:

The film chronicles the life of the mormon from Utah who sparked a global mission to save Tibetan Buddhist culture. E. Gene Smith was the founder of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, currently located in New York City under the roof of the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art and the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation.

I've heard of Gene Smith on more than a few occasions. He was held up as an example of a man who had dedicated his life to the Dharma through his unending support of Tibetan culture, its Buddhism, and especially the preservation of the Tibetan Canon of texts.

Most people are aware of at least some of the reality of the last 50 years of Tibet and how many of its people, and most of its leadership, fled to India for refuge after the Chinese took over Tibet at gunpoint. What many people don't realize is that these Tibetans often fled with only what they could carry on their backs. Tibet has a rich culture, especially a textual tradition. Imagine if the Vatican had to flee Italy with only what its people could carry and any other texts from a more than thousand year long history might just be lost forever (during the Cultural Revolution is what not uncommon for texts to be burned by the Chinese). Gene Smith's work (and that of many others as well) has been to try to digitize and preserve texts that have made it out of Tibet in an effort for the Tibetans to not lose their cultural and spiritual history. Often only a single copy of a given text has made it.

As their kickstarter page states:

With the Buddhist thought at its core, his goal was to digitize the more than 20,000 volumes he rescued in order to provide free access to the story of a people. With technological advancement speeding forward, Gene’s vision was to make these texts accessible to everyone, even in the most remote monasteries and villages, and preserve the knowledge they contain for humanity.

This is the official trailer, which says things much better than I could ever hope to do:

The filming is done for this documentary and they are raising funds for final production work for color correction and audio production with this footage. Please consider donating to it right now on the kickstarter page.

You can find more information at http://digitaldharma.com and they have a facebook page also.

I want to close with one clip from the film. This is His Holiness, Menri Trizin Lungtok Tenpai Nyima, who is the abbot of Menri Monastery. For those that don't know, HH is the head of Bon, which is usually thought of as the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet. The actual truth is more complex as Bon is a mixture of Vajrayana Buddhism with native pre-Buddhist, shamanistic beliefs. It is now recognized to be the fifth branch of Tibetan religion but has undergone challenges for recognition because of historical factors. I include this clip because it shows the inclusive nature of this documentary and because, little known to most of my readers, I actually took refuge with a Bon teacher years ago and feel ties to the tradition.

I encourage people to contribute to this project at the kickstarter page. I also encourage people to visit the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center. This is the project for the preservation and digitization of the texts and they could really use your donations as well.