Buddhist monk vs. hackerspace (2011)
boingboing.net
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I was there when it happened. It's funny now, but it goes to show that "radical inclusivity" has its own costs. Put another way, including everyone actually means excluding some. This wasn't initially obvious, though, in retrospect, it should have been.
I'd like to thank the Geek Feminism movement for really evolving the discussion around that. We all had a lot of growing up to do.
Noisebridge has, in the past half-decade, learned from its mistakes and begun a more structured program of welcoming and introduction. Also, we lock the door at night now (that helps a lot).
Do you any literature you can point me to?
Thanks for posting it.
Just to be clear, do you mean "everyone" could not fit in the space, by being all inclusive that some would self exclude, etc.?
More gray, more of slippery slope are those who are hostile or even just annoying. Like do you exclude the lifers cause the feminists will fight or vice versa. You might feel neo nazis are right out (I'd argue 1. You must protect the freedoms of all to protect freedom of any 2. It is far better to have people like that out in open than hiding away). But what about wwii reenacters or war gamers. People think they are nazis for wearing the uniform or playing with toy tanks.
In communities without this social more, it's very easy for things to degenerate into radical groups fighting to get on top in public-perception terms so they can demonize whatever group they oppose and get them pushed out of the community.
Sounds like this person just decided to set up shop without respecting other people's use of the same space, and with no efforts towards being non-disruptive. And then when people intervened and had conversations multiple times, they still refused to be respectful. So they got kicked out, and subsequently left an angry voicemail that misunderstands the constitution. The fact that this person already had two other temples they could use nearby made it seem even more like proselytizing, which just made it worse.
https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/20...
I think the reaction could have been quite different if the person had asked about using the space and fixed the space back to how it was afterwards, and had not proselytized. Doesn't seem like too much to ask for a free public space.
Jo Freedman wrote a now-legendary essay on exactly that issue in 1970. She was writing about her experiences in the women's liberation movement, but her essay is essential reading for anyone aspiring to run an organisation in a non-hierarchical manner.
I wish I'd read this a decade ago.
It sounds like your community has figured out the first kind of power somewhat, but I urge you to consider carefully the second form of power.
It's likely that your community, like many, is currently run by its founders, people who are successful leaders because they enforce rules that people want to follow anyway--people have voted them into power with their feet (if they didn't like you as a leader, they would leave).
But what happens to the community when you leave or die? Often a member of the community steps up to take the reins, and while that person might understand the goals of the organization, they might not understand how to implement those goals, especially when implementing those goals requires setting aside their own basic human urges and ego. Almost no organization survives the first few changes of leadership in a positive form. You may think you're okay with this, that your organization can end with you, but keep in mind that it may live on and cause more damage than it ever did good.
The solution is to create rules which limit your own power and give the community the ability to enforce those rules on you. That way your community has the power to survive a transition of power.
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/general-news/20150418/pasade...
His followers spend a lot of time on the internet saying that he is the greatest buddha of all time
http://www.dharmadhatu-center.org/ https://medium.com/the-buddhist-tribune/who-is-his-holiness-...
Their museum in downtown SF has a special free admission promotion going on for the next 20 years http://48hills.org/sfbgarchive/2012/08/08/worship-long-haire...
They bought the former lutheran church on 23rd St: https://www.reddit.com/r/evilbuildings/comments/4vgp3d/found...
Being a respected teacher of Buddhism is partly about your lineage, or the path you can trace from your teacher to their teacher to their teacher to all the way back to Buddha. It looks like Dorje Chang just bribed some guys and printed up some certificates.
While I have found some of the teachings interesting and occasionally useful, I don't follow Buddhism myself, so perhaps my perspective is insufficient, but this all seems to me a bit bonkers and sort of creepy. "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him", isn't it supposed to be? - as opposed, say, to venerating him as though he were in his own person something special, rather than merely someone with an unusual sort of insight.
This guy writes about his rating of various unconventional Buddhist groups
http://viewonbuddhism.org/controversy-controversial-teacher-...
"I would recommend serious caution when people are called "Living Buddhas". Such kind of title pretty much goes against all Buddhist ideas of modesty. Also when teachers promote practices for wealth and fame, or even promise 'instant enlightenment', it may be good to start asking some serious questions about the main purpose of their own 'Buddhist' practice."
Any time you see words like Dorje or Rinpoche it's safe to assume your dealing with Tibetan Buddhism which differs significantly from Zen. Zen is like Buddhism that went to China and picked up some Taoism while Tibetan Buddhism is like Buddhism that went to Tibet and picked up some Tantric practices.
This sort of guru worship is common in Tibetan traditions. It's less common elsewhere but if you look into scandals, even in the Zen community, there are abuses of power that rely on this absolute deference to a teacher.
So it's a bit more accurate to say that tantric Buddhism went to Tibet (and merged with Bon's animism), and then hung on there while it died off in its country of origin.
(Tantric Buddhism also made its way from India, through China, and to Japan, where it survives as Shingon Buddhism)
I found this really cool map that agrees with you, even if I kind of wish it had names of particular schools along the arrows.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Bu...
And full credit to the prof I had for the couple of electives I took on Buddhism in uni, for getting this stuff to stick in my head.
But then again most people who follow some sort of religious thought are bad at it :/
Buddhism as a whole isn't the liberal, laissez-faire faith that many western seekers would like to believe. Many schools of Buddhism are highly dogmatic and hierarchical. By the same token, Buddhist thought is far more substantive than just being nice to people and doing a bit of meditation.
For instance, most westerners would be very surprised to read the Devadūta Sutta, which describes numerous realms of hell.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.130.than.html
As nananonymous suggests, Buddhism tends to absorb ideas from whatever culture it encounters. There are influences from Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism and a multitude of traditional belief systems. For better and for worse, the western understanding of Buddhism is filtered through the lens of our dominant ideologies.
Buddhism isn't better or worse than any other religion, just different. Buddhist monks are much more than just jovial caricatures in orange robes. Buddhism has a history of intolerance, oppression, discrimination and abuse, just like any other religion. Buddhism has odd sects, cults of personality and bitter divisions over issues like homosexuality and the status of women. Trying to define "real" Buddhism is just as futile as trying to define "real" Christianity or "real" Islam.
The sect has a huge cultural bond with what translates into English as abstract one liners of the shock therapy genre, combined with gaining insight by teaching students how to expand that... discussion starter into an entire discussion. So that's the first problem resolved. No holy clay tablets with these dudes, shocking "Trumpian" one liners that belong on TV clickbait news are how they roll.
From the point of view of the sect, your enlightenment is your goal and its obtainable via internal effort and right thinking so if you think meeting the right dude makes the religion all about you and who you meet ... or if you think you'll get enlightenment solely by meeting impressive people ... or if you think impressive people are by definition of impressive those who are more enlightened than you are ... or if you think your religious path should be about other people not yourself and your own path to enlightenment ... or if you think people who brag about enlightenment to you are anything but the lowest form of scammer and criminal, then you're wrong at the level of basic core beliefs of the sect. You might personally disagree, whatevs, thats just how they see it.
BTW the kill bit is very intentional. Per the sect, similar to most human organizational codes, killing other people is pretty much about the worst possible way to proceed on your path to enlightenment and this is their peculiar way to declare that one itty bitty little step underneath the sin of killing people is the slightly less sinful mistake of worshiping other people as idols. You're better off having lots of sex and eating meat and squashing (literal) bugs than becoming a cult member, at least WRT getting anywhere on your religious path. Or maybe you could read it as at least WRT the path to enlightenment, becoming a cult member is perhaps roughly as effective as becoming a murderer (aka extremely strongly advised against)
So yeah, bringing it back around, in that sect, kinda the whole point is making your religious practice that of venerating some dude who brags a lot about being more enlightened than thou as you mentioned as an example, is totally not seen as useful. That doesn't necessarily mean you have to kill him but it means venerating him would be as useless as becoming a murderer in other words maximally ineffectual.
Note that there is a larger variety in belief in Buddhism than Christianity. In Buddhism there are many who would honestly disagree with this particular sect's advice about how much you should trust wandering opinionated gurus. Usually they have a great pile of differences in religious and non-religious culture such that they're more immune, have semi-elaborate defense mechanisms against false prophet cult leader type situations. So this sect relies on "You're an idiot if you join a cult" social pressure whereas other sects rely on extremely low levels of freedom for the theoretical cult leader due to traditions and maybe trust in ancient era hierarchical authoritarianism such that lunatics won't be appointed as central policy and if central policy sucks, at least its far away, and on average that works pretty well.
Dorje Chang, Fa Zang's teacher, claims that he's the 3rd incarnation of the historical Buddha, the one that Buddhism is based on. But this Dorje Chang lineage isn't a lineage in the sense of The 14th Dalai Lama, or The 16th Karmapa. In those lineages there's a transmission of teachings, some real cultural functions, Wikipedia pages...
But this goes beyond the usual claiming of Rinpoche status, or saying that he's some long-forgotten Tulku, I'm not sure his claimed lineage* even exists or is in any way recognized by any of the major schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
Non members have a limited standing invitation on craft nights, and are not allowed to use power tools or any other non trivial machinery; and expressions of bigotry will get guests thrown out.
Compared to noisebridge's "accept anyone and everything until they make it impossible for us" circa 2011 (the story described here) it is the opposite, I think.
https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/20...
My favorite: https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/20...
I also had thought of bringing my then girlfriend as it could have been interesting to her - i'm sure glad i didn't.
Also the Rinpoche incident was almost 6 years ago!
I might give it another shot, i live closer now.
As an exercise, I thought, how might I have approached this. What came up in the shower was something along the lines of:
This debate isn't really about a freedom of religion or tolerance, though it might seem like it. The Hackerspace has its own community, with it's own unspoken code of conduct, ethics, and values. Those values appear to be violated. I argue, though, there is a lot more in common between technologists and the Buddhists.
Hackers value freedom. The freedom to create, and to tinker. There is something liberating about being able to discover surprising things about the world, and reconfigure them in clever ways. Hackers do not like technological shackles. The practice of being able change technology is an exercise in this freedom.
Buddhists also value freedom -- the freedom of the mind and self. While classical Buddhists will argue up and down about the emptiness of mind, we're really talking about liberating all sentient beings from mind-made illusions. When you strip away the Mahayana (ceremonial) garments of Tibetan Buddhism, at it's core is about the liberation from the tyranny of yourself.
Ever had these nagging thoughts that won't go away? Ever wonder sometimes why things seem to suck even if everything seem OK? While Buddhist meditation practices do not specifically address psychology, it cannot help overlap it. Being aware of how mind and nature of mind leads to clearly seeing yourself.
In other words: these meditation practices hack the mind.
How effective are they? Can you measure happiness? To what extent can technology help or hinder this? Wouldn't you want to know?
There are some things that Hackers can benefit from the Buddhists, in so far as the hacking of the mind. So why would the ceremonies be uncomfortable?
To this, I address the Buddhists, some things from the core doctrines:
1. Right action 2. Right speech -- make no divisive speech 3. One of the Bodhisattva attainments: to teach according to where each person is at.
Can you honestly say this is Right Action and Right Speech? Is your speech really reaching the hackers?
The Hackers might state that law protecting freedoms is important, but as you know, causes and conditions can distort and change understanding of this. Not everything important might be said out in the important. What is _unsaid_ may be more important. Are those deeper values being honored?
If the core common value is freedom, maybe there is something the Buddhists in turn can learn from the hackers. They may want to participate, but participate in their own way. To measure what is going in the brain while someone is meditating. To record and track any benefit such practices might have.
The Bodhisattva ideal has this streak of radical inclusiveness too. There's something here that might benefit both groups.
There are no (few) formal rules, just the weight on inconvenience. By physical necessity only one person can work with a tool at once so as long as you share nobody minds being temporarily without, but if you do something like take all the tools at once you're inconveniencing everyone and people will complain.
If you box up all the tools and move them out of the room you're inconveniencing all others who'd work in that area. If there are less of you than them, or if you're doing things you could do in any other space, you'll rightly be asked to move because it inconveniences you less than the people trying to do hacky things with the tools.
And leaving the space setup in your way is rude unless you're coming right back. Nobody minds if you run to the washroom but if you go to 7-11 for snacks you'll come back to find your tools in use at another station. If you go home for the night, you'll get complained to when you come back in the morning.
> In other words: these meditation practices hack the mind.
Sure sure, but to they need the whole room to be left unusable by other hobbies to do so? Can't they hack the mind in the corner and clean up after themselves?
> The Bodhisattva ideal has this streak of radical inclusiveness too. There's something here that might benefit both groups.
In the monks refusing to cleanup? "Oh, I don't do my dishes because it radically includes others in my cycle of life, peace brother."
> How effective are they? Can you measure happiness? To what extent can technology help or hinder this? Wouldn't you want to know?
Oh god no, just do the bloody dishes and quit trying to dodge the issue.
This is all just being thrown out as some weird excuse for space-dominating actions and making the space less comfortable for everyone.
When the dishes are clean, we can talk.
That's addressing a very different issue. May I assume you were there back then when this happened, and this was one of the issues that came up within the community?
> > "When the dishes are clean, we can talk."
> That's addressing a very different issue.
That's the generic answer to people who won't cleanup after themselves. Room setup and tool positions are a bit abstract but everyone understands dirty dishes. And everyone recognizes the type of person who always tries to play the X-card (religion in this case) to avoid cleaning up after themselves.
There's always some esoteric reason why they and their activities are special, but relating it to dishes usually cuts through the special and gets to the mundane - nobody wants to pick up after you to use the space.