bodhidave

@bodhidave.bsky.social

2400 Followers 346 Following

humanistic psychodynamic Buddhist deconstructionist ... and all-round sweet guy interested in cross-cultural parallels in contemplative practice . https://utexas.academia.edu/DavidCollins [header is the rock garden at Ryōan-ji; avatar is an enso]

a blonde donkey and a grey donkey taking their time moseying down to the gate from the grassy hillside field they live in, where I will be giving them some chopped apples
Buddhist art depicting the Buddha with a begging bowl in one hand and reaching down to touch the ground with his other.
Buddhist art depicting the Buddha with a begging bowl in one hand and reaching down to touch the ground with his other.
photograph of the stunted raccoon Jimothy with an outline of the Fibonacci spiral super imposed on his body
a rabbit slowly hops a couple times at the edge of a field which is largely covered with a foggy morning mist
grassy hillside yard below a car park and a couple trees, with the upper half of a small rabbit poking above the grass
black and white photograph of Buddy Holly smiling and leaning back a little as he snaps his fingers
a fast-flying moth that looks a lot like a bumble bee, with a yellow body and clear wings, feeding on the purple blossoms of a butterfly bush
a bush with grape-like clusters of purple flowers, on which is feeding a black swallowtail butterfly with iridescent green-blue underwings
darkening grey skies over oranges and yellows, above a dark green fields and some trees, a country road and a mailbox beside the road
a little black and white toy Australian shepherd puppy with blue eyes, lying on a wooden porch, seen from between the wooden balusters
a little black and white puppy resting his head and chin on my dark tennis show, over a red and tan floor rug.
a dark sky over still darker trees and a hill line, and a somewhat blurry crescent moon to the left and star-like Venus to the right
a crescent moon in the blue sky over a collection of pink and purple clouds above a darkening hillside, with trees on either side of the picture
a grey donkey pretty much cavorting down a hillside, slipping a bit at the bottom, and proceeding to the field gate expecting carrots
a round black meditation sitting cushion (zafu) resting on top of a flat square futon mattress, maybe three feet by three feet
a thin crescent moon and a bright star (Venus) just above some tree limbs against a dark grey sky
a grey-white and a blonde donkey eating bits of apple off the grass behind a metal gate, their wood shed in the background
a grey-white donkey trotting down a hillside toward a fence (where she knows I am going to give her some chopped apples)
a zooming out video of lots of flowers of various colors like pink and yellow and orange and combinations of those colors, against a dirt bank with lots of greenery
a smallish flower with many purple petals, growing in the grass close to the ground
darkening skies with the crescent moon and Venus up and to the left, with the silhouette of trees and a hillside on one side and below
Screenshot of the AI bot's response. It reads: "Fortunately, most wild boar want nothing to do with people. I've hiked in areas with lots of boar, and the vast majority of encounters end with the boar disappearing into the brush before you get close."
a darkening sky framed by the silhouette of hills and trees below and on the sides with Venus above and to the left of the thin crescent moon low in the sky
diagram labeled "spun yarn - an overview" illustrating how roving yarn becomes spun through rollers
Ink drawing of monk Huike offering his arm to Zen founder Bodhidharma, in a cave "wall-gazing"
a group of five or six crows on the ground in green grass beside a wet country road near a couple trees and mailboxes
a bee-like moth hovers over the purple flowers of a butterfly bush
animated coloring of a grey haired fellow sitting at a table talking with a younger, dark-haired man
a stunning image of columns of a temple of Poseidon ruins atop a promontory looking over the sea during a sunset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounion
four green arrows twisted into the standard three-arrow recycling symbopl
five-petaled flowers of bright pink and yellow, against greenery
donkeys Pearl and Sally poking their heads through a gate and looking at the camera, a grassy hillside behind them
broad blue sky with some pink clouds over a green grassy hillside on which are a pair of donkeys feeding on the grass
blue skies with some orange clouds between tall green-leaved trees on either side of a hillside country road
Nagasena begins his answer to King Milinda by asking him whether or not he travels in a chariot. King Milinda replies that he does indeed travel in a chariot. Nagasena then tells the king that he's going to ask him to point the chariot out to him, and Nagasena starts by asking whether the wheels are what the king means by "a chariot." The king of course answers that the wheels in themselves are not a chariot. Nagasena then asks the same thing about the reins, and the poles, and the axle, and so forth. Nagasena goes through every part of the chariot. Each time, the king has to say nothe wheels aren't a chariot, the reins aren't a chariot, and neither are the poles, or the axle, or any other part. Nagasena then asks the king whether something other than the wheels and the reins and all the other parts they've just named is the chariot. King Milinda again has to say no. Nagasena then replies, "If, dear king, none of these parts is a chariot, and if the chariot is not something other than these parts, I fail to find any chariot here." The word "chariot," Nagasena points out to the king, is just a sound we make. It's just a common designation, a convenient label. That word expresses a conception. It reflects a construction. There is really no such stuff as "chariot-ness." "Chariot" is like "Theseus' ship"—it's simply a name we give to a certain pattern or a certain event. Put another way: it's not the parts that make it a chariot, it's our mental conceptualization that makes it a chariot.
Buddhists are interested in this. They pay careful attention to the way our minds create things where there really aren't any "things." They have a story similar to the one about Theseus' ship. Buddhists call their story "King Milinda's chariot." Theseus may have been a mythic character, but King Milinda was historical. He lived in the second century BCE and was the king of Bactria, which was a land located in what's now Pakistan and which had been conquered a couple of centuries before by Alexander the Great. Buddhists remember King Milinda especially for a series of conversations he had with a monk named Nagasena. In their talks Milinda and Nagasena discussed some of the central teachings of Buddhism, and the story of King Milinda's chariot comes from one of their conversations. In this story, the king has asked Nagasena to explain to him what it meant when the Buddha said that there is no substantial "self."
... Think of it [the ship of Theseus paradox] like this. Imagine you're going to build a ship from scratch. You have the materials-the wooden planks, the iron nails, the rope, the sailcloth—all stacked up on the floor of a warehouse. Are those materials all laid out and stacked up like that a "ship"? I suppose someone could argue that they're a kind of potential ship or something, but the most straightforward answer would be no-a stack of wood, a bucket of nails, a coil of rope, and some cloth folded up and sitting on a warehouse floor aren't a ship. If you wanted, you could make something else out of those things, or never do anything with them and just let them stay there until they rotted and rusted away. They're not a ship. And when you do start putting those materials together in the form of a ship, you could also ask yourself at what exact moment do they turn into a ship? You can't really answer that, and the reason you can't answer that is because, again, "ship" is just an idea. "Ship" isn't a substance, it's not an "essence." "Ship" isn't stuff. "Ship" is just a name we give to a certain patternor, put perhaps even more precisely, it's just a name we give to a certain event. Here's one more way to say this: a ship isn't something which we make with wood and nails and sailcloth—it's something we make with our minds. And that's another example of our minds being wizards. It's another way in which our minds create how we see something. We call it a ship and we see it as a ship, but it's really ourselves who, through a mental concept, make it a ship.
1 Plotinus, Enneads 3.8.1.1-24, as translated in A. H. Armstrong, 1967, Plotinus with an English Translation, Enneads III.1-9. Loeb Classical Library, v. 442 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) [hereafter: LCL 442], p. 316, 363. I have substituted "an adult" where Armstrong has "a man." I've also capitalized "Nature," which I'm going to do with other passages from Armstrong's translations, as well. 2 The association of poien with "creation" seems especially fitting, and I'll sometimes substitute "creates" for other places where poien and its cognates appear in the quotations from Plotinus that will follow. 3 Ibid., 3.8.4.15-16, p. 371. The Greek word for "quietly" here is hesyche. In the fourteenth century (so, at the same time the Cloud author was alive), a group of Greek Orthodox monks in the monastery on Mt. Athos, which is on the coast of northwestern Greece, began a contemplative practice movement which is called Hesychasm-from that Greek word for quiet and silence and stillness. The Mt. Athos contemplative community continues today. 4 Ibid., 3.8.7.1, p. 381. 5 Ibid., 3.8.4.1-13, p. 369. The Greek term for "contemplative" in that last phrase, "contemplative nature," is philothamona, which literally means "contemplation-fond."
Plotinus writes, "what is called Nature ... quietly holds contemplation in itself." And he says, "all things come from contemplation and are contemplation."4 At one point he personifies Nature and he writes: And if anyone were to ask Nature why it creates [poiei]... it would say: "You ought not to ask, but to understand in silence... just as I am silent ... that what comes into being is what I see in my silence, ... and that I, originating from this sort of contemplation have a contemplative nature. 295 Plotinus suggests that we should practice "understanding in silence" the way Nature does. Silent contemplation is a process through which we're to realize, and find ourselves united with, the living, creative truth of all existence....
... Then are we now contemplating [theoroumen] as we play? Yes, we and all who play are doing this.... And it is likely that, whether a child or an adult is playing or being serious, one plays and the other is serious for the sake of contemplation, and every action [praxis] is a serious effort towards contemplation; ... voluntary action ... springs from the desire of contemplation ... the earth itself, and trees, and plants ... we can relate what the earth makes and produces to its activity [energeian] of contemplation, ... Nature, which ... has no power of forming mental images or reasoning, has contemplation in itself and makes [poiei] what it makes [poiei] by contemplation....' Plotinus says Nature is contemplation and it's by contemplation that Nature makes what it makes. The word he uses for "makes" is a form of the word poien—which means "do" or "produce" or "create." Our words "poem" and "poet" and "poetry" come from that Greek word poien?
green grass and three-petaled clover leaves and a couple of white clover flowers
a large white blossom, above which is a still closed blossom with a shiny metallic green beetle on it
a morning country road with green grass and trees on either side, and a sole black crow standing in the middle of the road
blue, grey, and orange-tinged skies above hills and trees, over a country road with a mailbox on the side of the road
darkening grey skies with clouds over a band of lighter colored orange-tinted sky above trees and a green grass field with a mailbox in the foreground
dark blue clouds over lighter blue and light orange skies, over an outline of trees and hills
zooming into a grassy yard to show a pair of cottontail rabbits in the grass
panning view of a green field with mountains in the background and some mist on the sides of the mountains
a hilly green farmyard with a grey donkey in profile in the middle of the image and a blonde donkey with head down toward the grass over to the right
a series of starburst-like fireworks explosions in a darkish sky over a horizon of dark trees
still shot from the movie Fiddler on the Roof of a pair of women with the caption "Somebody has to arrange the matches."
photo from my front door of my brother in shorts and a t-shirt with a battery-operated weed-eater mowing my lawn inside a patch of sunshine