It’s summertime. So here’s an important announcement and a hearty thank you!

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In the second installment of our live show, we answer two listener questions. First, we received a question about Shin Buddhist nembutsu practice and the concern that chanting the nembutsu might be something of a crutch, that while making one more calm it might distract us from very real world social problems. We frame this in a conversation about the middle way, the path between extremes of self-doubt and self-indulgance, and how difficult it is to actually walk that path. Our second question came in via Twitter during the live broadcast and was about, generally, the appropriateness of translating Japanese gathas, songs, or chants into English. We focus mostly on the music side the question, exploring the appropriateness of ease of setting English language songs to traditional Japanese musical styles (or vice versa).

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Our second live recording — actually live this time and broadcast via webstream across the Internets — was recorded in the lobby of the Jodo Shinshu Center. This is the first installment of that day’s recording. Our jumping-off point is our previous conversations about science fiction and Buddhism, focusing here on the issue of cosmology and world view. There are all sorts of ways that we form world views, many different types of cosmology in pop-culture or music. And certainly Buddhism has a distinctive cosmology itself. We suggest, though, that there’s a big difference between the world view of Star Trek fans and Buddhism in part because the later actually challenges us to question our assumptions about cosmologies and world views. We circle around a bit before getting back to some of the concrete ideas within traditional Buddhism cosmology (such as multiple Buddhas, the six realms of rebirth, and so on) and ask, is any of this relevant in our modern world? We make a strong case for its continued relevance regardless of whether or not you take it as literally or merely symbolically true.

Stay tuned for future releases from our live show in the coming weeks!

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This show will be available as a live webcast! Click here for more information.

For more info, check the Facebook event listing, or follow us on Twitter.

Thanks much to Amy Umezu for creating this awesome poster on such short notice!

Picking up from where we left off, this week we ask what does any of this sci-fi stuff have to do with Buddhism?! On the one hand, while there may be parallels between sci-fi and Buddhism, often they deal with similar issues in very different ways. How movies like Alien or Starship Troopers deal with otherness, for example, is to suggest that the other is completely alien and dangerous and must be completely destroyed. But in (Shin) Buddhism, otherness is the compassion of Amida, something that completely embraces us. In our further explorations of the genre, we recognize how sci-fi forces us to think differently about simplistic ideas such as good and evil or what we assume reality is, pushing us to question our own motivations or preconceptions. Harry makes the mistake of asking Scott about time travel (don’t get him started on time travel!) which takes us off into a conversation about karma, free will, and predestination. All of which we wrap up with a question about whether or not our mediated experiences are taking us away from reality or are just a reflection of a different type of reality.

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This week, Harry and Scott take up the topic of Buddhism and science fiction, inspired in part by our off-hand conversation about Cthulhu from a couple weeks back and in part by Harry reading Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the novel that in turn inspired the movie Blade Runner. (Spoiler alert! We give away the ending and lots of plot points, so, you know, listener beware.) This gets us talking about several themes in several seminal sci-fi works that are relevant to Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy including the nature of the self, what it means to be human/a sentient being, what is reality, and, of course, “who am I?” Dick’s story seems to suggest that empathy is the defining characteristic that sets humans apart from artificially created replicant androids. In Blade Runner, memory serves a similar function. But in both the book and the film, empathy and memory can be artificially generated which highlights the way that sci-fi is able to force us to question reality or to see reality in a different way. This of course gets us into Star Trek, The Matrix, Starship Troopers, and Star Wars, among other things. Scott unapologetically calls the original 1977 Star Wars film a “pretty cheesy movie” (break out the fan-boy hate mail!) before we wrap it all up with the question of what any of this has to do with Buddhism — a conversation that is continued in part two.

Don’t forget to check the website for information on our live recording next month and, as Harry recommends at the start of this episode, follow him on Twitter.

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Continuing on in our meandering diversion from a conversation about the Shinshu Seven Masters, this episode starts right where we left off last time in a conversation about the promises and pitfalls of “one Buddhism” or a universal religion. The underlying issue here has to do with problems of difference or “otherness,” something that we somehow manage to relate both to post-colonial theory and Mahayana philosophy. (No. Really.) In post-colonial theory we find the urge to both deify and demonize the other (which has particular implications for Buddhism’s transmission to the West); and in Mahayana we find a tension in the perennial debate between the complete otherness of nirvana from samsara versus the form-is-emptiness stance of the simultaneity of nirvana and samsara. And believe it or not, all of this actually brings us back to Genshin — one of the Seven Masters of Shin Buddhism! But don’t worry, we don’t linger there too long; we’re still pretty caught up on Cthulhu and Aliens.

Speaking on Aliens, don’t forget to check out our website for more information on our upcoming live recording in April.

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Join us at the Jodo Shinshu Center on Saturday, April 10 for a live recording of the DharmaRealm podcast. Doors open at 1 p.m.

Following a short musical performance, we’ll be discussing, among other things, Buddhist cosmology and imagined worlds. How are Buddhist ideas of rebirth, Pure Lands, and other worlds relevant to our everyday practice? And how can other imagined worlds in pop-culture help us understand Buddhism? You can get a sneak-peek of this topic in our March 19th episode on Buddhism and science fiction.

The show starts at noon and is free and open to the public. Our public shows always include plenty of time for discussion, so come with your questions and we’ll do our best to address them.

You can send your questions to us here by clicking the “Have a question link” on the right-hand side of this page. Or submit questions via our Twitter feed or Facebook page.

This show will be available as a live webcast! Click here at show time to watch live!

Some time ago, a listener asked us to talk about the Seven Masters and we dutifully responded with an episode on Nagarjuna. We thought we might take a stab at the other Masters, but this post quickly veers off topic — but the diversion is well worth a listen! The conversation begins with a discussion of how the various Shin Seven Masters are common to a lot of other Buddhist schools suggesting a common denominator or point of contact for intra-Buddhist dialogue. But we acknowledge that each school interprets these great Buddhist teachers in its own way thus highlighting the differences. This leads to a conversation about language and the tendency among some to reduce the whole of the Buddhist tradition down to an easy essentialism and the dangers (as well as potential benefits) of this type of behavior. Be sure to listen to part two in a couple of weeks for the continuation of this conversation.

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Inspired by a conversation amongst fans on our Facebook page, we take up the issue of vows in Buddhism. Obviously, we need to start with how vows are understood specifically in the Mahayana context, especially Bodhisattva vows. But these aren’t the only types of vows in Buddhism, and we discuss different types of vows. Some are almost future tense (things we’re promising to do) whereas other are definitely past-tense — especially the vows that Dharmakara Bodhisattva made before he became Amitabha Buddha. These vows set up a karmic mechanism by which all sentient beings are able to enter the bodhisattva path and attain Buddhahood. So, where is the vow? It’s the question we try and tackle in this first episode of 2010.

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