Tag: Buddhism

What Did the Buddhist Say to the Hot-Dog Vendor?

~ cafebedouin ~ Leave a comment

“What did the Buddhist say to the hot-dog vendor?”

“Make me one with everything.”

And then, somebody’s later addition…

The hot-dog vendor makes him his hot-dog with all the trimmings, and says, “That’ll be $7.50.”

The Buddhist reaches into his saffron robes, extracts a $20 note, hands it over, and starts eating. The vendor turns to the next customer… but the Buddhist interrupts him. “What about my change?”

The vendor is unperturbed.

“Change comes from within.”

—”What did the Buddhist say to the hot-dog vendor?” Status-Q. November 30, 2025

Categorizing Knowledge

~ cafebedouin

On spending some time thinking about the tweet above, I’d like to reframe the topic. It suggests knowledge can be obtained via:

  • Sutra (direct, logical, practical)
  • Tantra (esoteric, nuanced)
  • Dzogchen (perfect)

But, a categorization of knowledge that I think is more intuitive is:

  • Explicit (knowledge transcribed via text, media)
  • Implicit (knowledge that is transferred person-to-person, apprenticeships and guru-student relationships)
  • Personal (knowledge from our lived experience, such as birthing a child)
  • Universal (knowledge that encompasses the lived experiences of every conscious entity – past, current and future)

The act of creating can move knowledge that is implicit, such as this idea about four categories of knowledge, and by writing it on this blog, it moves from something implicitly understood to explicitly understood. But, even written, there are gaps. What about some particular case? There is more implicit knowledge that is not made explicit, and the implicit springs from the personal.

The Buddha had to have a realization about suffering, an understanding that sprang from his experience. He can talk about it. He can teach followers. But, in the end, each follower is responsible for realizing the truth for themselves, personally. But, this personal understanding also taps into a larger, universal truth about the nature of suffering, a Universal Truth.

Turning the Other Cheek & Loving-Kindness

~ cafebedouin

“And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also.”

-Luke 6:29 (KJV)

There’s a common phenomena, where people do not like you, your ideas or whatever, and you come into conflict. Perhaps you say something that they disagree with. If you are online, if you hold any opinion, there is someone, somewhere who will disagree with you. Or, even if they do agree, they might misinterpret what you have said. They will turn what you say into a strawman, and then they will attack it, and by proxy, they are attacking you.

Normally, when I think of “turning the other cheek”, I think of physical violence. But, it occurs to me today that it is more interesting to think about it in terms of disagreement. Paul Graham, in his essay “How to Disagree,” outlines levels of disagreement:

  • DH0: Name calling
  • DH1: Ad Hominem
  • DH2: Responding to Tone
  • DH3: Contradiction
  • DH4: Counterargument
  • DH5: Refutation
  • DH6: Refuting the Central Point

Name calling, ad hominem, responding to tone and contradiction are the most common types of disagreement. People often look to attack another person’s insecurities. Responding to a statement like, “You’re stupid!” is in a way confirming that you are worried about being, or looking to an audience, smart. “No, you’re stupid!” validates the claim as worth responding to and scores a point, in the status games people play. Since you’ve responding in kind, you’ve also validated that this response is an appropriate one.

There are many ways to turn the other cheek. You might respond by referring to the cultural norms of communication: “That’s not a nice thing to say.” You could choose to ignore the statement entirely. There are some actions that may look like turning the other cheek, but aren’t, such as saying: “I hope saying these bad things about me makes you feel better.” And so on.

There are underlying status games in these kinds of conversations. They are aimed at an audience. But, who is the audience? In many cases, we are the audience. We are judging ourselves.

The great thing about online discussions are that the stakes are so low. It’s a great training ground, because most of the conversations are with people we do not know in social environments that will either cease to exist or completely change in a few years. Very little is of any real consequence. So, it is an opportunity to practice, to refine our technique.

But, we should always remember that there is a person on the other side. It is not merely a question of “turning the other cheek”, it is a question of how can I respond more skillfully. Offering the other cheek or our coat is also more than simply absorbing violence without reciprocating. It is responding to the need of the other person in that moment, to the degree that we can. It is getting to the point where we can bypass our instinctive response to reciprocate, absorbing the conflict and using it as fuel for our practice that transcends our brittle egos. Done well, we might be able to return something positive.

I’ve not reached that point. My tendency is to ignore stupid comments and leave bad environments. But, transforming these situations into positives is the real challenge. How can we respond, not only by offering the other cheek, but emphasizing with the suffering of our attacker, feeling loving-kindness toward them and the circumstances that gave rise to the attack, and taking the opportunity to cut at the root of suffering in ourselves and others?

This is hard work. You need to learn to concentrate, develop insight and your capacity for loving people. It’s a training of a lifetime. Over half my life is gone, and I’ve yet to even make a start.

Commonalities of Buddhism & Weightlifting

~ cafebedouin

I have been reading Jack Kornfield’s book about spirituality and Buddhism A Path With Heart. As a short summary of Part 1: The Fundamentals, he starts with basic questions.

What is your goal? He suggests a path with heart is the goal of spiritual practice. Are we in touch with our fundamental goodness? Are we loving well? Have we learned to forgive and live from the spirit of love rather than from a spirit of judgment?

Cultivating goodness and love means stopping the war within ourselves, which leads to wars with others. Stopping the war means “taking the one seat”, finding a single spiritual tradition and following it through the pain and conflict. We can use this to make our mind, body and heart healthier, which allows us to progress spiritually.

Going through, I keep being reminded of how much this is exactly like weightlifting. What is your goal? Get strong. To get strong, you have to be open to pain. The war within is our desire and tendency to avoid pain. This is impossible when lifting weights. No pain, no gain.

What about taking the one seat? There are many different ways to train, and which is best depends on your goals. If your goal is to get strong, as opposed to say aesthetics, there are established methods, such as Starting Strength. Adopt one, stick to it, and you will see progress, often quick progress. The key is consistency. Do one practice. Do it several times a week for an hour or more, and you will improve.

What is true of the body in weightlifting is also true of the mind and heart. If we train our mind with a standard practice, like focused meditation on the breath, do it consistently, daily, we train our mind to be focused. It develops insight into the workings of the mind and leads to greater concentration.

But, perhaps most important, at least in my case, is development of heart, connecting to feelings of love and remaining, open, vulnerable to the world. Maitrī, or loving-kindness, can be developed, like a muscle. We start with the loving-kindness we already have for those closest to us, and through meditating on others try to expand this feeling from our close circle to the entire universe.

I was once at a Quaker Meeting, where someone said, “When learning to love, don’t start with Hitler.” Strangely, some people find it hard to love themselves, believe that they are bad, Hitler-adjacent. But, if we are unable to love ourselves, with all of our intimate knowledge of our failings, we will find it difficult to learn to love others, without making idealized, fictionized versions of them, which is not real love.

In summary, weightlifting provides an interesting parallel to Buddhism. Training the mind and heart is no different than training the body, receptive to the same techniques. A well-rounded person needs to train mind, heart and body — all three.

The Two Reasons People Fail

~ cafebedouin ~ 3 Comments

“The two reasons that people fail to attain path knowledge and fruition knowledge in this life are bad companionship and insufficient practice or instruction…Today there are many people [who] know the method but never put it into practice or are not serious in their efforts, and so they missed out on attaining path and fruition. This is insufficient practice.

-Mahasi Sayadaw, The Manual of Insight, Somerville, Mass. Wisdom Publications, 2016, pg 36.

True of enlightenment. True of life generally. Surround yourself with good people and make an effort, and many things become possible.

Book Summary: Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

~ cafebedouin

To summarize the main ideas:

Thinking is not a substitute for lived experience. The idea of being a mother, combat veteran, a disciple of a spiritual teacher – pick any experience you don’t have – and having the idea about it is not the same as having lived it. And, it is worse than that, many of the experiences we do have, we’ve replaced the experience with thoughts, so we are alienating ourselves from our own lived experience, at practically every moment.

The substitution of our ideas for our lived experience is the source of our suffering. The idea of self, preferences and aversions for certain experiences, etc., all work to alienate us from our actual experience. The way to counteract this effect is by the three trainings: morality, concentration, and wisdom.

Morality is everything we do in the ordinary world that requires judgment and planning. Concentration is the ability to settle your mind on what you wish. Wisdom comes from focusing our attention on our lived experience to the point that we see it clearly, not through abstractions. Through these three trainings, we can improve our receptiveness, our focus and these will lead to a fundamental realization of what’s real and what is mind-made.

The unreal has three characteristics: impermanence, dissatisfactoriness, and no-self. Everything is impermanent. If nothing is permanent, then the person at birth is not the same as the person you are now. This is equally true, no matter how thinly you slice time. The person you were a nanosecond ago is not the same person you are right now. It is our desire to reject that reality for permanence, of condition and of self, that gives rise to dissatisfaction.

Drop to the level of sensations. The only thing that is real is what you are experiencing in this moment, and even then, by the time it registers, it is over. Everything is a phantom – memories of the past, plans for the future, ideas about the present and even sensate experience is over before we realize it. This is why it is difficult to understand what is real.

On the path to understanding the real, there are five spiritual faculties to cultivate: faith, wisdom, energy, concentration and mindfulness. The first four can be thought of as wheels on the bullock cart with mindfulness as the driver. Balance faith/wisdom and energy/concentration. Then, strengthen and balance them again.

Awakening is achieved through seven factors: mindfulness, investigation, energy, rapture, tranquility, concentration, and equanimity. The hindrances are sensory desire, ill-will/malice, sloth/turpor, restlessness/worry and doubt. Finding the right balance between focus and ease is the secret to a good life.

What makes it good? We are able to access peace and happiness by turning our minds to them. By renouncing certain aspects of life, we cut off sources of suffering. Just knowing that it is possible, right here in this life, right now, to be free of suffering is a huge relief.

These are the Four Noble Truths. You’re going to be dissatisfied. This dissatisfaction has a cause. It can end, and we have a method to end it. No need for heaven, secret teachings or being a saint. All you need to do is follow the instructions. If four is too much, all you need is one idea. Suffering can end.

There are people walking around right now that are enlightened. It wasn’t just back in Buddha’s day. You may know a person who is enlightened. If you don’t, perhaps you could. How?

Buddhists talk about the Noble Eightfold Path.

  • Morality: right speech, right action, right livelihoo
  • Concentration: right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration
  • Wisdom: right view, right intention

If you want to make quick progress, then:

  1. Do lots of practice in daily life
  2. Go on more and longer retreats
  3. Consistently concentrate and develop the ability to investigate quickly and precisely
  4. Pay attention more often in their daily activities
  5. Be morally together

The best time to meditate is any time you can, preferably right now. With strong enough concentration, our whole inner landscape becomes subject to our control.

The Discourse of Loving Kindness in Sutta Nipata

~ cafebedouin 
What should be done by one who's skilled in wholesomeness
To gain the state of peacefulness is this:
One must be able, upright, straight and not proud,
Easy to speak to, mild and well content,
Easily satisfied and not caught up
In too much bustle, and frugal in one's ways,
With senses calmed, intelligent, not bold,
Not being covetous when with other folk,
Abstaining from the ways the wise ones blame,
And this the thought one should always hold:
'May beings all live happy and safe
And may their hearts rejoice within themselves.
Whatever there may be with breath in life,
Whether they be frail or very strong,
Without exception, by they long or very short
Or middle-sized, or be they big or small,
Or thick, or visible, or invisible,
Or whether they dwell far or they dwell near,
Those that are here, those seeking to exist --
May beings all rejoice within themselves.
Let no one bring about another's ruin,
And not despise in any way or place,
Let not them wish each other any ill
From provocation or form enmity.
Just as a mother at the risk of life
Love and protects her child, her only child,
So one should cultivate this boundless love,
To all that live in the whole universe
Extending from a consciousness sublime
Upwards and downwards and across the world
Untroubled, free from hate and enmity,
And while one stands and while one walks and sits
Or one lies down still free of drowiness
One should be intent on this mindfulness -- 
This is the divine abiding here they say.
But when one lives quite free of any view,
Is virtuous, with perfect insight won,
And greed for sensual desires expelled,
One surely comes no more to any womb.

-The Buddha's Words in Sutta Nipata

How the Dalai Lama Spends His Day

~ cafebedouin
  • 0300: Wake
  • 0300-0330: Shower & Hygiene
  • 0330-0500: Prayers, meditations and prostrations
  • 0500-0530: Walk
  • 0530-0600: Breakfast of hot porridge, barley powder, bread with preserves and tea and listens to BBC World News
  • 0600-0900: Meditation and prayers
  • 0930-1130: Reading Buddhist texts
  • 1130-1230: Lunch, vegetarian at home and whatever is served while away
  • 1230-1530: Work, audiences and interviews
  • 1530-1700: Talk with audience
  • 1700-1730: Tea
  • 1730-1900: Prayers and meditation
  • 1900: Sleep

“When His Holiness is at home in Dharamsala, he wakes up at 3 am. After his morning shower, His Holiness begins the day with prayers, meditations and prostrations until 5 am. From 5 am His Holiness takes a short morning walk around the residential premises. If it is raining outside, His Holiness has a treadmill to use for his walk. Breakfast is served at 5.30 am. For breakfast, His Holiness typically has hot porridge, tsampa (barley powder), bread with preserves, and tea. Regularly during breakfast, His Holiness tunes his radio to the BBC World News in English. From 6 am to 9 am His Holiness continues his morning meditation and prayers.

From around 9 am he usually spends time studying various Buddhist texts and commentaries written by great Buddhist masters. Lunch is served from 11.30 am. His Holiness’s kitchen in Dharamsala is vegetarian. However, during visits outside of Dharamsala, His Holiness is not necessarily vegetarian. Following strict vinaya rules, His Holiness does not have dinner. Should there be a need to discuss some work with his staff or hold some audiences and interviews, His Holiness will visit his office from 12.30 pm until around 3.30 pm. Typically, during an afternoon at the office one interview is scheduled along with several audiences, both Tibetan and non-Tibetan. Upon his return to his residence, His Holiness has his evening tea at around 5 pm. This is followed by his evening prayers and meditation. His Holiness retires in the evening by around 7 pm.

“Routine Day.” DalaiLama.com.

If we assume prayers and prostrations are an hour, looks like the Dalai Lama is meditating about five hours a day and he sleeps for eight.

Crystal Nights by Greg Egan

~ cafebedouin

“The Phites who’d invented the boost had had one big advantage as they’d tinkered with each other’s brains: it had not been a purely theoretical exercise for them. They hadn’t gazed at anatomical diagrams and then reasoned their way to a better design. They had experienced the effects of thousands of small experimental changes, and the results had shaped their intuition for the process. Very little of that intuition had been spoken aloud, let alone written down and formalised. And the process of decoding those insights from a purely structural view of their brains was every bit as difficult as decoding the language itself.”

—Greg Egan, “Crystal Nights.”

Struck me as an interesting example of how lived experience cannot be reduced to language and abstraction.

Books I’d Like to Read in 2021

~ cafebedouin

A short fiction where I pretend to you, dear reader, that I am still capable of reading more than a book a week.

  1. Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel M. Ingram
  2. Fool on the Hill by Mark Sargent
  3. The Omnibus Homo Sacer by Giorgio Agamben
  4. Cargill Falls by William Lychack [x]
  5. Black Imagination by Natasha Marin (Editor)
  6. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
  7. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth by Marilyn Waring
  8. Deep Adaptation by Jem Bendell [x]
  9. The Carrying: Poems by Ada Limon [x]
  10. Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen
  11. Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures by Mary Ruefle [x]
  12. How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community by Mia Birdsong
  13. Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions by Martin Gardner
  14. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology by Gregory Bateson
  15. Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues by Catharine A. MacKinnon
  16. War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires by Peter Turchin
  17. Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs
  18. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy
  19. Take the Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Survivor by Susan Gordon Lydon
  20. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum
  21. Ball Four by Jim Bouton
  22. The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men by Robert Jensen [x]
  23. The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
  24. Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World by Olga Khazan
  25. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch
  26. Modernist Cuisine at Home by Nathan Myhrvold
  27. On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee
  28. Another Birth by Forough Farrokhzad
  29. Darkness Spoken by Ingeborg Bachmann
  30. So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ
  31. Oblivion Seekers by Isabelle Eberhardt
  32. The Neopolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante
  33. Machines in the Head by Anna Kavan
  34. The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos by Rosario Castellanos
  35. Mad in Pursuit by Violette Leduc
  36. The Wedding by Dorothy West
  37. The Hebrew Bible by Robert Alter
  38. The Red Book: Liber Novus by C.G. Jung
  39. New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver
  40. Heart of the Original by Steve Aylett
  41. On the Brink of Paradox by Augustin Rayo
  42. The Commonwealth series by Peter F. Hamilton
  43. Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher W. Alexander
  44. Sandworm by Andy Greenberg
  45. Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis
  46. A Passion For Friends by Janice G. Raymond
  47. The Precipice by Toby Orb
  48. Wild Pork and Watercress by Barry Crump
  49. Daring Greatly by Brené Brown
  50. Primeval & Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk
  51. Consuming the Romantic Utopia by Eva Illouz
  52. Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich