Dr Dosti Regmi Blog

Derrida's deconstruction, Buddha's dependent co-arising, and Tao's yin-yang: Cause, condition, and context. -Dosti Regmi Language has flaws. We have seen words break things in our lives when they carried meanings we did not intend to express. When we have a dispute, the grudges we hold will be over certain words or phrases that were used. Noble Silence is Buddha's advice for word-weariness. They say, "Speak only when your words can improve on your silence." We are often misunderstood, and we cannot mend the wounds inflicted by words. Words are fatal. They inflict violence upon the truth we hold. Words and bullets cannot be reversed, they say. But words often fail to hit our targets. The essence is missed in the translation of meanings to words in the sender's part and words to meanings in the receiver's side. Buddha says there is no essence, irrespective of the cause and conditions. Another flaw that logocentrism carries is the binary view of the worl...

बिदाको दिन, दिउसो को समय। एउटा आलस्य छाएको छ। यो आलस्य रहस्यमय छ। गतिशील समयले टक्क उभिएको अभिनय जो गरेको छ।

Will words ever truly represent reality? Who will truly understand what you say or want to say? Sometimes, you may not even find someone to listen to you, just like the cabman Iona in Anton Chekhov´s short story "Grief." The cabman's son recently died. The cabman desperately and unsuccessfully tries to talk with the people he meets and tell them of how shattered he is. No one bothers to listen to him, and he ends up talking to his horse, which does not interrupt him and chews his grass and breathes on him.   Even if you get lucky enough to express it. Will the word represent your true thoughts? Suppose you feel uneasy with someone in a relationship and are trying to observe and understand the relationship. A friend comes and tells you, "How can you even survive in this relationship? It's a toxic relationship." The introduction of the word "toxic" makes you align your evidence to match it and forget the evidence that does not align. So, is the word...

Zen story: "The other boat is empty." This story teaches a lesson about anger and ego. It goes as follows: A man is rowing his boat across a river when he notices another boat heading straight toward him. At first, he shouts for the other boatman to steer away. As the boat draws closer and still doesn’t change course, his anger flares, and he yells even louder. However, when the boat finally reaches him, he realizes it is empty, adrift without anyone to blame. The story highlights that anger often arises from our assumptions and ego. When there is no one to blame, the anger dissipates. It teaches mindfulness and self-awareness, encouraging us to look inward instead of attributing blame outward. The Zen Cup 1: Once, a person went to the Zen master and complained about a thousand and one petty things in life that disturbed his mind. The master handed him a cup filled to the brim with water and said, "You must carry this cup around the square three times without spilling a ...

We think that the more preferences and choices we have, the more free and affluent we are. We think that the more thoughts we have, the more ideas we have, the more able to form opinions and categorize things, and the wiser we are. But, there is a paradox with the preferences, choices, and opinions. The preferences are bondages.  I had already done the laundry and all of my son's clothes were clean and tidy except the red pullover with Spiderman he was wearing. He was adamant that he wanted the red pullover only because red was his favorite color.  He went to the school with that same stinky dirty red pullover. So what did his preference for red color give him? Maybe he had thought that he had won his way in his little quarrel with me where I had to give up on his choice. In fact, his preference for the red color had refrained him from the choices of the other better clothes options. (Pic:  Moumita Mukherjee)

11/18/2024 People suffer 90% of the time in imagination and 10% of the time in reality. Mindful living in the present/reality can help reduce a lion's share of our suffering. It does not hurt you because others touched you. It hurts when where they touch and where your wound is matches. The fault is in you having the bigger wound rather than others touching you. No one can hurt you without your consent. 11/29/2024 Depression is not the problem with thoughts. It's the problem of vitality and energy. To wake up, do daily chores, and try to be useful and kind shit. Thoughts are the fillers filling the unoccupied space in people´s minds. And the thoughts are true about the reality of life. There is suffering and no inherent meaning or path. A vitality-filled filled curious mind can take it as a relief and freedom. If there is no path, it's sure that you will never be lost. Life is about awareness, engagement, and onepointedness. 12/16/2024 With ChatGPT writing a better poem and...

अर्थको कुरा त हाम्रो आगडी घाम जस्तै छर्लङ्ग छ। आऊ एकैछिन बिना अर्थको कुरा गरौँ ।

  One: Involuntary recollection of the past when we had peaceful experiences is useful in our practice. It's appraisal can be read in the Marchel Proust book, In Search of the Lost Time.  When Buddha abandoned the ascetic forms of meditation, he recollected the time in his childhood when he was peaceful and meditated in the shade of a tree during the busy plowing ceremony and practiced the same technique, and attained enlightenment. We all had such experiences and knowledge in the past. Because as Zen says we are already Buddha nature and we all have forgotten it. Two: There is a drizzle, patter against leaves, and drumming on rooftops. I can smell the soil—that muddy and earthly smell. The rain releases a distinctive, earthy aroma called  petrichor.   The smell is attributed to a mixture of geosmin produced by bacteria, volatile plant oils, and ozone gas from the rain. It gives me an involuntary recollection of my childhood ( voluntary recollection would b...

 Which is the path?   Which of the above picture do you think the path is? The path described by Buddha or the path whose soil, your bare foot is treading? It is obvious. Not just the rhetorics and teachings of the 8-fold path and learning it by heart. The path is where the surroundings change after every mile and after every turn. The heaviest burden the spirituality is bearing is the scriptures itself. The teaching of the teaching of the teaching of the teaching and so on and so forth. Philosophizing is a problem rather than a solution in our life because the thinking hampers our pure perception, the extraordinary boon we all already have. The most used vocabulary in spiritual conversations is the most ambiguous, unrealistic , and faulty.. atman, brahman, moksha, nirvana, shunya..They are faulty maps of the reality that will sabotage and keeps you away from perceiving the reality that whispers at your ears, crawls on your skin,  lingers at your nose and fills your heart...

The Buddhist conception of enlightenment isn’t intellectual. It’s experiential. It’s kind of like being a parent: If I went back in time and tried to explain to my younger self what it feels like to be a dad, nothing I could say would adequately convey it. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to be a dad until I actually became one. In the same way, you cannot truly know what it’s like to be enlightened unless you’ve realized enlightenment. To be enlightened is to be liberated from our habitual reactivity, freed from our perceptions and ideas to see reality as it is without wanting it to be different. I would go further and say that enlightenment is also freedom from wanting to be enlightened. Any notion we have about what enlightenment is can get in the way of actually experiencing it. Put another way, enlightenment isn’t something you get or find; it’s something you rediscover—a state of being that has always been in you but that has been covered with made-up stories...

The you that you do not know. The reality is the Mind dreaming. The mind of the other is always enigmatic. There is no free will. There is no clear line between right and wrong. Death is negative only when you think about the end of all the positive possibilities. Death if accepted as neutral is neither positive nor negative. (Dreams tell us how our minds can manipulate the information. Before studying philosophy you are not serious. While you are studying philosophy, you are serious. When you have studied the philosophy , you will be no more serious. Vedanta is idealist and believes in non-duality. Zen is practical and says it's neither one nor two. It can be interconnected or even shunya.) - Book,What does it all mean (Thomas Nagel)

Striving to improve ourselves, we have destroyed ourselves. Our greatest enemy is any thought that promises to improve ourselves, Following a promise to improve ourselves is a sheer disrespect for what we are. Every thought is a distraction from what we are. And so are the circumstances and characters we meet and the substances we use. We are already Buddhas. That´s why Zen master says "If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him." -Dosti Regmi  

मध्य रात, म टेबलमा पढ्दै, सोच्दै छु; आखिर मानिसहरु म सङ किन यस्तो व्यबहार गर्छन् ; म मानिसहरु सङ कस्तो व्यबहार गरुँ । ओछ्यानमा सुतिरहेको छोराले आफू एक्लै भएको थाहा पाएर बोलायो, "मामु, बाबा।" उत्तर, खोजेको भन्दा नजिक हुन्छ। आँकलन गरेको भन्दा सरल, सजिलो हुन्छ। अक्सर सोचेको भन्दा फरक हुन्छ। सत्य, कुनै पुर्णिामाको रात बुद्धलाई आफ्नो अनुहार देखाएर, सधैंका लागि अलप भएको पनि होइन होला। यो त घर, घरमा  जन, जनमा मन, मनमा, बिहान,दिउसो, बेलुकी  घटित भैरहेको हुन्छ। Truth is more near and simple than we think and often counter-intuitive. Here, now and beyond mind; to be precise.

We all have one nasty friend. Everything he does is annoying. Everything is ridiculous. You don't like the way he does anything. You disapprove the way he talks,walks,sits, and speaks. You want to debate with everything he says. You want to correct everything he says. You already have a different explanation, logic and point of view that what he says. You always cannot help fixing him but later realize he is unchangable and just accept him for what he is. Similar nasty friend is your mind. Watch his moves. This will be easier for you. The watcher will be you. You are pure. Your friend is nasty. That nasty friend is your mind. What ever you add to what is already pure will be an impurity. Your are already pure. If there is light in the third eye, well and good. If there is dark nothingness, even better. When you have thet purity, the purity will spill out of the time of meditation. Meditation is not about making you prepared or prone to enlightenment. Meditation is enlightenment. Yo...

Jhana -> Chan -> Zen Simplicity and an open mind are the essence. Our "original mind" includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. You should not lose your self-sufficient state of mind. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind, there are few. Right practice: Right posture:  There is no two and no one. A Zen master would say, "Kill the Buddha!" Kill the Buddha if the Buddha exists somewhere else. Kill the Buddha, because you should resume your own Buddha nature.  Right breathing: Breaths are just like the swinging door. Ebb and flow of the waves. You observe but cannot control it. This moment the swinging door is opening in one direction, and the next moment, the swinging door will be opening i...

There is a story about a samurai whose master was assassinated. It was this samurai’s duty to restore his lord’s honor by avenging his death. As days stretched into weeks, the samurai relentlessly tracked the killer. When he finally found the assassin, the samurai drew his sword and prepared to deal the killing blow that would settle the score. But before he could, the murderer spat in the samurai’s face. Enraged, the samurai sheathed his sword and walked away. The samurai knew that if he killed his master’s assassin from a place of anger, there would be no honor in his actions. The samurai understood that motive matters. He knew that to live with honor, we must practice self-awareness, be deeply honest with ourselves about what’s really driving our behavior, and make choices based upon that which we truly value.

T HERAVADA B UDDHISM IN A N UTSHELL  - Ajahn Amaro (Adapted from a talk given on a retreat held at the Angela Center, Santa Rosa, California, November 1997)  A couple of days ago,   a few people asked: “What is Theravada Buddhism?” It’s a good question. Often, people have come across Vipassana , insight meditation, and its related teachings, disconnected from their origins. Sometimes they are unaware that Vipassana has anything to do with Buddhism or who the Buddha was. How it began The Buddha started his life as the crown prince of a small kingdom in what is now Nepal. He was born around 563 BCE, although, of course, scholars and different Buddhist lineages disagree on the exact date. After being cosseted within the confines of the palace for his first 29 years, the spiritual impulse led him to take up the life of a wandering ascetic. After a few years of intense meditation practice and many pointless austerities, H...