I love multiculturalism. My daughter has 3 Chinese heritage children, first generation born in America students, with parents who were born in China. I've read a lot of books about China, really like Bill Porter's travel books and his translations of poetry, and I talk to parents in the park. I love learning Chinese culture, which is so unique and diverse. There are 56 ethnic groups in China.
Studying other cultures you notice patterns. The Chinese New Year is based on the new moon today. Some call it Lunar New Year because it's not just Chinese. I couldn't see the new moon through the clouds this morning, and I wasn't sure I could notice the outline even without the clouds.
I'm reading Buddhadasa's book on anapanasati, and he writes about how nature is important as part of the practice. He's a famous Thai monk who lived from 1908-1993.
Wikipedia: Buddhadasa renounced civilian life in 1926. Typical of young monks during the time, he traveled to the capital, Bangkok, for doctrinal training but found the wats there dirty, crowded, and, most troubling to him, the sangha corrupt, "preoccupied with prestige, position, and comfort with little interest in the highest ideals of Buddhism. Buddhadasa rejected the traditional rebirth and karma doctrine, since he thought it to be incompatible with sunyata, and not conducive to the extinction of dukkha.
"Take the question of whether or not there. is rebirth. What is reborn? How is it reborn? What is its kammic inheritance? These questions are not aimed at the extinction of Dukkha. That being so they are not Buddhist teaching and they are not connected with it. They do not lie in the sphere of Buddhism. Also, the one who asks about such matters has no choice but to indiscriminately believe the answer he's given, because the one who answers is not going to be able to produce any proofs, he's just going to speak according to his memory and feeling. The listener can't see for himself and so has to blindly believe "the other's words. Little by little the matter strays from Dhamma until it's something else altogether, unconnected with the extinction of Dukkha." (Heart Wood From The Bo Tree)
Thoreau’s Journal, Feb. 10, 1852— people are wrong if they think I feel superior
Now if there are any who think that I am vainglorious, that I set myself up above others and crow over their low estate, let me tell them that I could tell a pitiful story respecting myself as well as them, if my spirits held out to do it; I could encourage them with a sufficient list of failures, and could flow as humbly as the very gutters themselves; I could enumerate a list of as rank offenses as ever reached the nostrils of heaven; that I think worse of myself than they can possibly think of me, being better acquainted with the man. I put the best face on the matter. I will tell them this secret, if they will not tell it to anybody else.
