Around 1000 CE, a bengali monk named Atisha wrote a book named “Lamp on the Path to Enlightenment” that describes Lojong practice in full. It’s a practice that is very heavily involved in dealing with negative happenstances. The story goes that when Atisha heard that the people of Tibet were good-natured, happy people, he was actually worried that they would never make any progress because they didn’t have enough negative emotion to work with in his Lojong practice. When he visted Tibet, he took along with him his ill-tempered Bengali servant boy, who would criticize people incessantly and was never any pleasure to deal with, in order to give the people there something to overcome.
I stumbled across the practice recently, and it’s a wonderful teaching. It reminds me of Buddhist loving-kindness meditation, wherein the meditator meditates on feeling love first for him or herself, then loved ones, then just people the practitioner knows, then eventually includes all of humanity, including the practitioner’s enemies. Lojong is much like that, but it deals more with changing one’s reactions to negative emotion and happenstances.
Here are some of my favorite proverbs from the root text (source: Wikipedia):
Find the consciousness you had before you were born.
Let even the remedy itself drop away naturally.
Stay in the primeval consciousness, the basis of everything.
Between meditations, treat everything as an illusion.
As you breathe in, take in and accept all the sadness, pain, and negativity of the whole world, including yourself, and absorb it into your heart. As you breathe out, pour out all your joy and bliss; bless the whole of existence.
Understand your attachments, your aversions, and your indifference, and love them all.
When practicing unconditional acceptance, start with yourself.
When everything goes wrong, treat disaster as a way to wake up.
Take all the blame yourself.
Be grateful to everyone.
Don’t worry – there’s nothing real about your confusion.
When something unexpected happens, in that very moment, treat it as a meditation.
Dedicate all the merits of what you do for the benefit of others.
Follow the inner witness rather than the outer ones.
Always have the support of a joyful mind.
Always observe these three points: 1) Regularity of practice. 2) Not wasting time on the inessential. 3) Not rationalizing our mistakes.
Change your attitude, but stay natural.
Do not discuss defects.
Don’t worry about other people.
Work on your greatest imperfection first.
Abandon all hope of results.
In all your activities, have a single purpose.
Accept good and bad fortune with an equal mind.
Recognize your neurotic tendencies, overcome them, then transcend them.
Exclude nothing from your acceptance practice: train with a whole heart.
Always meditate on whatever you resent.
Don’t depend on how the rest of the world is.
In this life, concentrate on achieving what is most meaningful.
Don’t let your emotions distract you, but bring them to your practice.
While Westerners typically go out and party on New Year’s Eve, in Japan it is a more reflective time, spent at home. The traditional meal is Toshikoshi Soba, or “year end soba”. I was made aware of this recipe when browsing a reddit thread about what everyone is doing for NYE, and decided to try it. It was so good, I’m making it again this weekend. The original recipe calls for an eggs to be broken over the bowl, but since the wife and I are vegan, we attempted a veganized version.
The original recipe is found over at Just Hungry, so if you want to try the original, go for it.
For the Dashi stock:
1 strip Kombu seaweed
3 or 4 dried shitake mushrooms
5 cups of water
Use one slice of Kombu per 5 cups of water. Don’t be a hero and use two slices. It may not seem like one slice is enough, but jeebus don’t do it. Simmer the water with the Kombu and Mushrooms until it has a good color to it. The Kombu should be the consistency of a cooked lasagne noodle. Toss that shit out, but keep the mushrooms. If there is a bubbly film, just skim it off.
For the Kaeshi (this is where the awesome flavor comes into play):
1 cup good quality dark soy sauce. I used some stuff I found at an Asian Grocery. It came in a huge bottle and had some sort of freaky baby on it. I couldn’t even tell you what brand it was.
Roughly 1/4 cup Mirin. Mirin is a rice cooking wine typically used in Japanese cooking. If you can’t find it at the grocery store, try health food stores.
Roughly 1/4 sugar plus a bit more for good measure. Dang I should really learn to measure things.
Put the Mirin in a sauce pan and simmer for about five minutes until most of the alcohol content has boiled off. Add the sugar and mix that in until it’s melted. Add the soy sauce and heat that up to just shy of boiling. If it boils, you screwed up royally and your mother was right, no one will ever love you and you will die alone in a gutter somewhere outside of a mining town in the Yukon because you couldn’t even muster the skills to make Kaeshi, you failure.
Pulling the soup together:
By this point you should have boiled the soba noodles. I used roughly 1.5 bundles of soba noodles for two people and it seemed to come out just fine. Cook the noodles until just this side of al dente. Is there a Japanese word for “al dente”? There should be. But you understand what I mean here. Go right up to the border of fully cooked, but don’t do it(!) because those border patrol agents are watching you, mister man. Bring those noodles with you to the border. Drain ‘em and rinse in cold water.
Bring the Kombu broth to a simmer (if it isn’t already). Once that is nice to a warm, add the Kaeshi little by little, tasting as you go. I ended up not adding all the Kaeshi I made, so don’t worry about wasting it. Gradually bring up the ratio of Kombu to Kaeshi until it passes the wife test. The wife test, in case you don’t know, is you let the wife taste it and if she won’t eat it, you didn’t add enough. Once you get the thumbs up, add your veggies and noodles. The tofu in the picture is superawesomelyfirm silken tofu, but honestly it was all we had in the house. I threw some scallions in there too, but really you can go to town with whatever you want.
That’s it. Simple. Delicious. Enjoy. Preferably with Sake.
In 2005, a groundbreaking study was conducted, then published in the Journal of Religion and Society that compared 18 prosperous democracies and the effect that religion has on the populace.
Drawing on a wide range of studies to cross-match faith – measured by belief in God and acceptance of evolution – with homicide and sexual behavior, Paul found that secular societies have lower rates of violence and teenage pregnancy than societies where many people profess belief in God.
It gets even more interesting.
Top of the class, in both atheism and good behavior, come the Japanese. Over eighty percent accept evolution and fewer than ten percent are certain that God exists. Despite its size – over a hundred million people – Japan is one of the least crime-prone countries in the world. It also has the lowest rates of teenage pregnancy of any developed nation.
…
At the other end of the scale comes America. Over 50 percent of Americans believe in God, and only 40 percent accept some form of evolution (many believe it had a helping hand from the Deity). The U.S. has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy and homicide rates are at least five times greater than in Europe and ten times higher than in Japan.
It’s a great read. As interesting as those quotes are,it gets better the more you read.
This is the first post of the new log, heralding the entry of a new blog into the vast cosmos that is the blogosphere.
The idea I had was to consolidate my now dormant writing site and my active photography site under one roof, this domain. I decided to add a log as well, and will occasionally post news, information, political commentary, and the occasional recipe.
Where am I?
You are currently viewing the archives for January, 2009 at log : ngl.
