Citas: PULP (1994) Charles Bukowski

 

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"Often the best parts of life were when you weren't doing anything at all, just mulling it over, chewing on it. I mean, say that you figure that everything is senseless, then it cant't be quite senseless because you are aware that it's senseless and your awareness of senselesness almost gives it sense" (p. 152).

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Casi siempre lo mejor de la vida consistía en no hacer nada en absoluto, en pasar el rato reflexionando, rumiando sobre ello. Quiero decir que pongamos que uno comprende que todo es absurdo, entonces no puede ser tan absurdo porque uno es consciente de que es absurdo y la conciencia de ello es lo que le otorga sentido. œMe entienden? Es un pesimismo optimista.

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"I needed a vacation. I needed 5 women. I needed to get  the wax of my ears. My car needed an oil change. I'd failed to file my damned income tax. One of the stems had broken off of my reading glasses. There where ants in my apartment. I needed to get my teeth cleaned. My shoes were run down at the heels. I had insomnia. My auto insurance had expired. I cut myself every time I shaved. I hadn't laughed in 6 years. I tended to worry when there was nothing to worry about. And when there was something to worry about, I got drunk." (p. 175). 

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Necesitaba unas vacaciones. Necesitaba 5 mujeres. Tenía que ir a que me quitaran los tapones de cera de los oídos. Mi coche necesitaba un cambio de aceite. No había presentado la maldita declaración de impuestos sobre la renta. Se me había roto una de las patillas de las gafas de leer. En mi apartamento había hormigas. Tenía que ir al dentista a que me hiciera una limpieza de boca. Tenía los tacones de los zapatos gastados. Tenía insomnio. El seguro del coche me había vencido. Me cortaba cada vez que me afeitaba. No me había reído desde hacía 6 años. Tendía a preocuparme cuando no había nada de que preocuparse. Y cuando había algo de que preocuparse, me emborrachaba. 

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NOTAS: Lotus Sutra

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“the five practices of the preacher of the dharma (preserving, reading, reciting, explaining, and copying the sūtra)”

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“Lotus Sūtra's own instructions in Chapter Ten, “Wherever this sūtra is taught, read, recited, copied, or wherever it is found, one should build a seven-jeweled stūpa of great height and width and richly ornamented” (169).”

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“in Japan we find sumptuous copies of the Lotus Sūtra in which each character is drawn inside in a stūpa, as though enshrined there as a buddha would be.”

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“We find copies of the sūtra in which each of the ten scrolls that compose it has a frontispiece on indigo paper depicting the events of the chapter in that scroll, all centered around a gold nine-storied pagoda where the two buddhas sit side by side. When one looks closely, the lines of the pagoda are composed of the characters of the sūtra. In this way, the artist both copied the sūtra and built a stūpa, two deeds extolled in the sūtra itself.”

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NOTAS: Taking the Leap

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“Moment by moment we can choose to go toward further clarity and happiness or toward confusion and pain.”

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“Taking the leap involves making a commitment to ourselves and to the earth itself—making a commitment to let go of old grudges, to not avoid people and situations and emotions that make us feel uneasy, to not cling to our fears, our closedmindedness, our hard-heartedness, our hesitation.”

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“We all have the natural ability to interrupt old habits.”

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“All of us know how healing it is to be kind, how transformative it is to love, what a relief it is to have old grudges drop away. ”

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“These qualities are natural intelligence, natural warmth, and natural openness.”

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“You just stop for a few seconds, breathe deeply, and move on. You don’t want to make it into a project. Chögyam Trungpa used to refer to this as the gap. You pause and allow there to be a gap in whatever you’re doing.”

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NOTAS: A Concise History of Buddhism

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“Since my first meaningful contact with Buddhism, some eighteen years ago, I have been surprised, amazed, frustrated, and perplexed by this diversity – I will not try to measure the proportion of each.”

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“I remain convinced that to be sceptical is not to be irreligious, nor is it to lack faith. However, it does bring with it its own dangers, particularly the twin poisons of superiority and cynicism”

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“I remain convinced that royal patronage and material wealth are not necessarily markers of spiritual health.”

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“The idea of a previous golden age contrasted with the present corrupt one is common in religious traditions, no less in Buddhism, probably from the start.”

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“I suspect that corruption of one sort or another has been present in the Buddhist tradition from the time of the Buddha, be it the corruption of the mere nominal membership of the Saṅgha, or that of a more vicious character.”

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NOTAS: The Buddha's Footprint An Environmental History of Asia

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“the Four Noble Truths:

1.  There is suffering.

2.  Suffering comes from desire.

3.  Nirvana is the solution.

4.  Nirvana can be achieved by means of the Eightfold Path.”

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“The Buddha supported the new market economy and what it entailed: urbanization, trade, wealth production, familial reordering, individualism, free will, and new political structures.”

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“Nature earns little notice in the Buddha’s teachings, but when nature does appear in early Buddhist texts, it is typically in terms of impermanence, decay, and as something to be avoided.² One will search in vain for anything that could be interpreted as an appreciation of nature in the early Buddhist canon.³ In a rare passage that mentions a beautiful mountain lake, it turns out to be a manifestation of hell.⁴ ”

“2. “Householder, suppose a man dreamt of lovely parks, lovely groves, lovely meadows, and lovely lakes, and on waking he saw nothing of it. So too, householder, a noble disciple considers this: ‘Sensual pleasures have been compared to a dream by the Blessed One; they provide much suffering and much despair, while the danger in them is great.’” Ñanamoli and Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 470–471.

3. As Yi-fu Tuan succinctly put it, “topophilia has no part in Buddhist doctrine.” Yi-fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and “Values (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 114.

4. “This Tapoda [boiling hell] flows from this: this lake of beautiful water, of cool water, of sweet water, of pure water, with lively and charming fords, with an abundance of fishes and turtles, and lotuses bloom.” Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 1, 188.”

NOTAS: Buddhism: A Short History

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La teoría del tipo:

“His re-formulation of the perennial wisdom was designed to counteract three evils.

1.   Violence

2.   The “self”,

3.   Death

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“For the last two thousand years Buddhism has mainly flourished in rice-growing countries and little elsewhere. In addition, and that is much harder to explain, it has spread only into those countries which had previously had a cult of Serpents or Dragons, and never made headway in those parts of the world which view the killing of dragons as a meritorious deed or blame serpents for mankinds ills.”

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“the Buddhists react to the unproven with a benevolent scepticism and so they have been able to accommodate themselves to every kind of popular belief, not only in India, but in all countries they moved into.”

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“As to the third point, concerning death; there is something here which we do not quite understand. The Buddha obviously shared the conviction, widely held in the early stages of mankind’s history, that death is not a necessary ingredient of our human constitution, but a sign that something has gone wrong with us. It is our own fault; essentially we are immortal and can conquer death and win eternal life by religious means.”

NOTAS: Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation

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“the meaning is always the same—that there is nothing and nobody there”

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“Today’s science supports this experience, but it is better put the other way around—the words of the Buddha support today’s science.”

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“Most of our scientists are not enlightened beings, although they know the truth that the universe consists of nothing but particles that come together and fall apart.”

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“Until then, all we have are words and intellectual understanding.”

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“The goal of the Buddha’s teaching is Nibbāna (Sanskrit: Nirvāṇa). Literally translated, that means “not burning,” or in other words, the loss of all passions.”

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“The two strongest senses are seeing and hearing, so we should pick one of those and watch how the mind reacts, become aware of the inner story telling.”

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“Mindfulness has four aspects: body, emotions, underlying mood, and content of thought.”

NOTAS: Being Nobody, Going Nowhere

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“One of our human absurdities is the fact that we’re constantly thinking about either the future or the past.”

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“There’s no other way to learn to live each moment except through meditation.”

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“Mind can only be cleansed by mind. What the mind has put in there, the mind can take out.”

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“One second of concentration in meditation is one second of purification because, luckily, the mind can only do one thing at a time. ”

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“The great renunciation that arises in meditation is to drop all thoughts. When there’s nobody thinking, there’s no ego confirmation.”

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“The spiritual path is all about letting go. There is nothing to achieve or gain.”

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NOTAS: Jizo Bodhisattva Guardian of Children, Travelers, and Other Voyagers

 

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“Our culture is fixated on youth. We neglect our elders like things stored in the attic and dread our own aging as a curse.”

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“If we enter spiritual practice hoping to know ourselves completely, then our proper attitude toward all creation is one of curiosity and ultimately of communion.”

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“investigate the mind and its creation, the world”

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“The mind’s attention is energy.”

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“Wherever the mind is directed, energy flows.”

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“The bodhisattva called Jizo in Japan and America is known by different names in other countries. In India he is Kshitigarbha Bodhisattva, in China Ti-tsang Pusa, in Korea Ji-jang Bosal, in Tibet Sati-snin-po.”

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Kshitigarbha Bodhisattva

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NOTAS: Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food

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“These pathologies of imbalance are driven by many complex factors in society itself. Sadly, they have resulted in cultural norms that support particular brands of delusion, obsession, and endless preoccupation with how much the body weighs.”

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“It doesn’t take much in the way of attention to realize that much of our lives are caught up in a preoccupation with the past and future at the expense of the present moment, the only time any of us ever have to nurture ourselves, to see, to learn, to grow, to change, to heal, to express our feelings, to love, and above all to live.”

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“If we are always on the way to someplace else, to some better now, when we will be thinner, or happier, or more accomplished, or whatever it is, then we can never be in wise relationship with this moment and love ourselves as we actually are.”

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“The problem is not in our food. Food is just food. It is neither good nor bad.”

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“The source of the problem lies in the thinking mind and the feeling heart.”

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“Mindfulness is the perfect tool for the delicate operation of laying open the inner workings of these two most essential organs.”

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“Mindfulness is awareness without judgment or criticism.”

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NOTAS: How to Train a Wild Elephant: And Other Adventures in Mindfulness

 

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“As you filled in all the brown areas, then the greens and the blues, a pleasing picture begins to emerge. Mindfulness practice is like that.”

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“I am a meditation teacher, and I live at a Zen monastery in Oregon. I’m also a pediatrician, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother, so I understand well how stressful and challenging daily life can become.”

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“You open the car door, search for your keys, back carefully out of the driveway, and . . . you pull into the parking garage at work. Wait a minute! What happened to twenty miles and forty minutes between house and job?”

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“Is that bad? It’s not bad in the sense of something you should feel ashamed or guilty about. If you are able to drive to work on autopilot for years without having an accident, that’s pretty skillful! We could say that it’s sad, though, because when we spend a lot of time with our body doing one thing while our mind is on vacation somewhere else, it means that we aren’t really present for much of our life.”

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“We all try over-the-counter remedies—food, drugs, sex, overwork, alcohol, movies, shopping, gambling—to relieve the pain of ordinary life as a human being.”

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NOTAS: In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey...

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“keep your thirst before you; for it can give you a source of light, guiding you to the place where life is most richly to be found.”

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“There is nothing inherently wrong with the thinking mind: rational analysis to solve problems is what is needed in many situations. But when we are sad or upset, and then begin to analyse and judge ourselves, thoughts can easily become an avalanche of self-blame and despair, in which the mind goes round and round, getting more and more upset.”

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“The insight that the Buddha discovered is so simple, and yet so difficult to accept. His teachings introduce us to a dormant, hidden, unrealized part of ourselves. This is the great paradox of the Buddhist path: that we practice in order to know what we already are, therefore attaining nothing, getting nothing, going nowhere. We seek to uncover what has always been there.”

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“my father had always told me: When you’re on a journey and you come to a wall, always throw your pack over first, because then you will be sure to follow.”

Nota: quemar los barcos.

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“The Tibetan word for meditation, gom, means “to become familiar with”

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“Adding wood to the fire deliberately brings difficult situations to the forefront so that we can work with them directly. We take the very behaviors or circumstances that we think of as problems and turn them into allies.”

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“We begin to rely on another aspect of mind that exists beneath our reactivity. We call this “no-self.” It’s the unconditioned awareness that reveals itself with the dissolution of the chattering mind that talks to itself throughout the day. Another way of saying this is that we switch mental gears from normal awareness to meditative awareness.”