BUDDHISM AND SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM

 

“Cultivating the Wisdom Gaze: A Contemplation on the Outer and Inner Causes of Globalization”

Judith Simmer-Brown, Ph.D. Religious Studies, Naropa University Boulder, Colorado

 

   When Tibetan Buddhist lamas fled the Communist Chinese tyranny in 1959, many came to the west to study, teach, and practice the dharma. The culture they encountered, however, presented special challenges to a genuinely spiritual life. In contemporary America, the dominant obstacle they observed was the predominance of materialism, a lifestyle of acquisition that promotes self-grasping. Tibetan teachers have remarked about how difficult it is for American students to practice meditation in a materialistic environment. Observing the difference with their Tibetan home, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche remarked, Because Tibet is an untouched and uncivilized country, people are quite happy with the simplicity of life. They do not long for the comforts and luxury of life. As long as there is food to eat and a roof for shelter, they are very happy. With that state of mind, when they go to retreat, their mind is simple and the decision is quite complete. They think, “Even if I die of an illness during this retreat, I will let myself die. Even if I die of starvation during this retreat, I will let myself die. Even if I die from the difficulties and hardship of the vigorous practice, I will be happy to die.”

 

  Tibetan teachers continue to ask how consumer mentality has affected the meditation practice of their American students, shaping intentions and expectations for spiritual development. Buddhist scholar Jose Cabezon has suggested that traditional and contemporary Tibetans are primarily concerned about how material wealth “deflect[s] one from pursuing the true, inner wealth of spiritual perfection.”

 

  Wealth is viewed as ephemeral and therefore rather than accumulating it, it is more important to spend and enjoy it while it is available, or to give it away. He refers to the 13th century Tibetan master Sakya Pandita, who reflected that those who have wealth which they neither use nor give away must be either sick or a deprived spirit. “Accumulating wealth without using it is like accumulating the wood for one’s own cremation. Those who do so are like bees, who put so much effort into manufacturing their honey only to have it taken away from them.”

 

  Accumulating wealth accrues many obstacles, for then the wealth must be protected and one’s greedy tendencies are exacerbated. When accumulation of wealth is an end in itself, it has the power of diverting one from the spiritual path and creating negative circumstances for future awakening.

 

  Over thirty years ago, my teacher Ven. Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, wrote one of first popular dharma books in America, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. This view of the challenges of western spirituality came to him while in retreat in a Padmasambhava cave in Bhutan. Trungpa Rinpoche at that time composed a ritual text called the Sadhana of Mahamudra that addressed the way in which contemporary societies are dominated by material concerns. This text was received in a visionary state as a terma, a hidden-treasure text, attributed to Padmasambhava as a contemporary contribution to the “dark age” dominated by the forces of materialism. In the book, Rinpoche identified what he considered primary obstacles to spiritual development in the west. The relevance of this analysis only increases each year.

 

Trungpa Rinpoche described the acquisitive pursuit that binds humans to suffering as the hallmark of construction of personal identity, or “ego.” To promote this core activity, three allegorical “lords of materialism” pursue three levels of acquisitiveness: the lord of form refers to physical acquisition, the lord of speech to conceptual acquisition, and the lord of mind to acquisition in the spiritual realm. According to these descriptions, materialism must be challenged or it will co-opt our physical lives, our communities, and our spiritual cores. “Physical materialism” refers to the compulsive pursuit of pleasure, comfort, and security as a balm for all of our problems and concerns. Culturally, it is expressed in the form of consumerism. On the conceptual level, “psychological materialism” seeks to control the world through theory, ideology, and intellect. We mentally create theoretical constructs that keep us from having to be threatened, to be wrong, or to be confused, thus putting ourselves in control. In American life, psychological materialism is expressed in science and technology, medicine and psychology. On the most subtle level, “spiritual materialism” carries acquisitiveness into the realm of our own minds, into our own contemplative practice or prayer, sometimes expressed as religious exclusivism or extremism.

 

Book Chapter FROM:, Hooked!: Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and The Urge to Consume edited by Stephanie Kaza, Shambhala Publications, 2004

 

[FULL ARTICLE ONLINE HERE @ ACADEMIA.EDU]

THE BEARDED ONE

THE PUER-SENEX STRUGGLE

A Note.

Samten de Wet

 

Albrecht Durer, Portrait of a boy with a long beard

 

PAEDOGERON

To understand the archetypal struggles embedded in the myths and their astrological equivalents, we have to place these fables in context. For example, the conflict between senex and puer - between the power of age and the power of youth, is well represented in our society.

We have, for example, the cultural or academic mafias, who hold onto power and do not allow any young energy to penetrate their vast ivory towers. We have seen Professors hanging onto their respective Chairs for decades and making it difficult to move on.

Gerontocratic governments with their flocks of politicians, as well as religious structures, have clung to power over hundreds of years. They still are entrenched, as we see with the rise of religious fundamentalism, and the rigidity of the literal interpretation of the text, e.g. stoning a woman to death for giving birth outside of wedlock. These are doctrinal calcifications, typical of Saturn.

Likewise, there exists an inversion, which capitalism has recognized as a value in its marketing strategies, where youth dominates, and does not answer to anything outside of its immediate concerns. This leads to a sort of mass infantilism -  the tantrums of spoilt children.

So, we have the power of the youth market, which denies or is denied, the wisdom and experience of age; and we have the aged, clinging to power for all it is worth. And it is worth very little, in the sense of Treasures in Heaven.  A case in point is the present Trump Regime in America. Guns and Motorcars, the toys of little boys, the dominator culture of testosterone. As we are to believe that the present astrological dispensation is The Age of Aquarius, we should consider the symbolic implications of this sign of the Zodiac.

Aquarius is extremely polarized by the energies of stasis and revolution. The Silver Key and Golden Key images, give us our thematic senex - puer polarity, in the Hermetic, Wise, Old Man of the Tarot, and the Water Bearer, or Pourer, sometimes associated with Ganymede, of the astrological symbol.  So somehow, in the Age of Aquarius, the Senex and the Puer, have to, and will cohabit in their action patterns, for the benefit of the larger society, and from there to humanity.

How could this paradigm be put into action?  Well, simply put, the lead must be tempered with a bit of quicksilver, mercurial energy, and the mercurial must be balanced with a touch of lead.  Gravity and levity have their place.

In other words, there must be a balance between Saturn and Mercury. At the moment we have the Saturn materialism of Militarization, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, while on the other side we have the Mercurial-Hermetic World Wide Web, the Global Brain, the Gaia - Ecology-Green Movements, and various empowered communities along the lines of gender, ethnicity, resurgent spiritualities and so forth, all very based in communication.

It is not the Youth of the Planet who planned the bombing of Vietnam, Baghdad &c. But they are the ones who died. Think of the millions who died in the 1^st World War.

Unfortunately, the Mass Media, with the emphasis on mass - as in massive, titanic, totalitarian,  seems to control the show. But likewise, the Mercurial Web, is also wiring over 60 million people to the Internet - and if open resistance is not evident, internal sharing of information is moving ahead at an ever-accelerating speed.  Saturn can only maintain power by withholding, distorting or inverting information. Mercury cannot be controlled because of its propensity to fragment into Mercurial spheres and reform at the slightest nudge into a unitive, holistic sphere.  The Senex-Saturnine is selfish - the Puer-Mercurial shares. But, as mentioned before, we also have the sharing Wisdom of the Senex, versus the selfishness of Youth!

“… the Roman god Janus with his two faces – the young beardless man looking forward and the old bearded man looking back.”

 

In this sense, we could speculate that the Past is the Senex & the Future is the Puer.

 

Edgar Wind in his Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958) amplifies the Durer image:

 

PAEDOGERON

 

8. For the combination of puer and senex in one hieroglyph, uniting Infancy and Old Age, Calcagnini used the expression paedogeron (^[1]). He first employed the term, with the explanation id est puer senex; in his translation of Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride (^[2]), which Panofsky mistakenly describes as 'never published and apparently lost' (^[3]).”

 

“As the term was believed to be Plutarch's, it is more than likely that H. Tietze and E. Tietze-Conrat were right in suggesting (^[4]) that Durer's Bearded Child in the Louvre is a paedogeron, or puer senex conceived as a hieroglyphic image. Like the triple-headed monsters in which Youth and Old Age counterbalance each other, this hoary infant would again signify Good Counsel or Prudence, that is, practical wisdom.”

 

Paedagogus ? paedo- (United States pedo-) combining form of a child; relating to children: ORIGIN  from Greek pais, paid- 'child, boy'.

 

Samten de Wet, Cape Town, February 2018, based on earlier versions.

---

[1] Opera, p. 20

[2] ibid., p. 237

[3] Durer II, no. 84

[4] Burlington Magazine LXX, 1937, pp. 81 f.

GLIMPSES OF THE GODDESS

 

IMAGE: Judith Shaw

 

The Shrine of the Bird Goddess, in the late 80's. The central piece, The Bird Goddess, is a very large painting – 6′ x 10′. The painting and installation was inspired by the work of Marija Gimbutas, amazing archaeologist who uncovered the ancient artifacts of a harmonious, pre-patriarchal Goddess-worshipping Neolithic Old Europe. [ONLINE HERE]

---

Paul Friedrich, An Avian and Aphrodisian Reading of Homer's Odyssey, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 2 (Jun., 1997), pp. 306-320

 

"THE MEANING, even the sheer presence, of birds in the Odyssey and in similar canonical, paradigmatic texts in other cultures is not obvious to many and has been ignored by all but a few of the legions of specialists. A similar statement could be made about an aphrodisian reading of the text. Yet Homer felt that birds were deeply significant, often as symbols of Aphrodite. To- day we can profitably explore these crucial and nuanced, albeit often subliminal or latent, meanings. Such exploration leads to unique understandings of essential, underlying values in Homeric culture and the cultures of the world generally".

---

Lucy Goodison, Death, Women and The Sun: Symbolism of Regeneration In Early Aegean Religion, Bulletin Supplement (University of London. Institute of Classical Studies), No. 53, (1989), pp. iii, vii-xi, xiii-xix, 1-261.

---

Mythical Representations of 'Mother Earth' in Pictorial Media

Nikos Chausidis

[University of Skopje, Institute for History of Art & Archaeology, Macedonia.]

 

Abstract. This paper summarizes our past researches of the pictorial representations of the Mother Earth myth and the separation of the basic iconographical types. Generally, the paper is not geographically cultural or chronologically limited. This means that we approach the phenomenon in its wider aspect, searching for its universal (transhistorical and transcultural) features. This is justified by the simple fact that the Mother Earth phenomenon itself possesses such a character, being universal for the bigger part of mankind. Yet, beside this principal openness, the focus of our research points toward the archaic cultures, i.e. those that had never, or not in a sufficient degree, entered the spheres of the cultures that are today regarded as civilizations. Here we have in mind the cultures of the Neolithic, the Age of Metals and the later centuries BC. We have divided the corpus of the pictorial representations of Mother Earth into several categories based not so much on the appearance but on the basic semiotic concept that generated them . . .

 

From: Archaeology of Mother Earth Sites and Sanctuaries through the Ages. Rethinking symbols and images, art and artefacts from history and prehistory, Edited by G. Terence Meaden, BAR International Series 2389, 2012

---

Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller, Spider Grandmother and Other Avatars of the Moon Goddess in New World Sacred Architecture, Journal of the Southwest, Vol. 54, No. 2, New World Sacred Architecture (Summer 2012), pp. 283-293, 295-303, 305-347, 349-397, 399-421, 423-435

---

Sabrina Higgins, Divine Mothers: The Influence of Isis on the Virgin Mary in Egyptian Lactans-Iconography, Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies 3–4 — 2012

 

Abstract:

This article provides an overview of the scholarship on the relationship between depictions of Isis and Mary that show them breastfeeding or offering their breast (representations of the lactans-type) in Egypt. In particular, it questions the notion of a deliberate cultic continuity between the two holy women based on the similarity of their iconography. The evidence demonstrates that whereas Isis lactans can be documented in the Mediterranean from 700 BCE until the fourth century CE, Maria lactans-imagery only appears uncontested in Egypt from the seventh century CE onwards. This evidence, therefore, does not warrant a generalization that there was a deliberate continuity between the cult of Isis and that of Mary. Although the similarities between the Isis and Maria lactans-imagery are undeniable, they need to be understood within their respective cultural contexts.