Making a Kangling for Chöd | Hacker News Reader

Making a Kangling for Chöd

buddhism-for-vampires.com

47 pointsexolymph7 comments

> If you do stressful work while sitting at a desk, as so many people do nowadays, you are almost certain to have a shortened, chronically tense psoas—a major cause of lower back pain.

Yoga instructors talk a lot about the psoas.

http://www.foundationyoga.com/sore-back-cranky-hips-your-pso...

A fictional form of Chöd (not to be confused by chod which is a swear word in India and Pakistan) ritual (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%B6d) will be familiar to readers of Stephen's King's It (https://heroism.fandom.com/wiki/Ritual_of_Ch%C3%BCd) where it is used to beat Pennywise. Here's a Quora answer that summarizes the ritual: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-ritual-of-chud-in-Stephen-...

Oh yeah, David Chapman wrote that stuff. Hard to say how tongue in cheek he was, but it was a part of his critiques on Western Buddhism.

The actual content describing Chöd seems accurate to me. (No, I have never played or handled a Kangling). I didn’t see anything tongue-in-cheek or satirical in the article. I think he wrote it up to mess with the sensibilities that underpin what he calls Western Consensus Buddhism.

Good guess, I think:

>> Buddhism for Vampires began as a joke, over on Vividness. I was writing about the hijacking of Buddhism by New Age space cadets, psychotherapists, politically-correct self-righteous bigots, and “nice” people who fear the real world and want to play make-believe instead.

https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/

Yup. On his Meaningness blog, Chapman posted extensive essays about Western Consensus “nice” Buddhism, and critiquing it. There were also a suggestion the Buddhist Tantra was more in lined with Western values (and an analysis on why), but it was not “nice”. (There were also issues about not getting proper training, or practitioners trying to fill in gaps with Shaiva Tantra and derivatives).

He had mentioned the vampire stuff on those blog posts, but I had thought he was satirizing by exaggerating the content. Hence the surprise for me: the content was not dramatized, just some superficial window dressing. That really tickled me.

There is an westernized version of Chöd, developed by Lama Tsultrim Allione, which is much much less dark and arguably inauthentic.

It... sounds like a kazoo?

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