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Love this point. It’s interesting materialists – philosophical or practical – see themselves as those who embrace the real, the factual, what is solid, out there, externally real; and they see non-materialists as living in the clouds, believing in their own ideations, in thing that are not really there, and so on. The LS shows that it’s the opposite … it’s the materialist who believes in thought-constructs and ideations and lives in the clouds. I’ve read a similar remark in Hegel (who was, not surprisingly, and “absolute idealist”, meaning he equated reality with mind), who said that it is the ordinary people that live in a “world of thoughts”, not the spiritual people. Since spirit is the reality and thoughts are the unreal projections, it is all reversed. The most common people, the people that hang out on Facebook all day, are the people who live in the world of thoughts, ideations, and abstractions. While the spiritual lives with the most concrete & real.
Wonderfully stated.
Along with your Facebook comment it’s always so apparent how the materialists worship their material gods and goddesses…as witnessed during last night’s halftime show with the super bowl, presenting the greatest primadona of them all–Madonna. She also once performed a song dealing with the “material world”–really says it all. Or, the “Elton John” commercial televised during the game–this morning on YouTube, his video has close to 2 million hits in just 2 days!
Also, with this materialistic culture thing, have you noticed whenever you google something, like destiny–what pops up first and foremost? Some popular icon like rock groups, ect. This stuff has really supplanted any semblance of true significance and meaning.
There’s also a materialist religion to accompany a materialist society. A religion that is all about feeding the poor, engaged, social action. While this is commendable, it can become like socialism, trying to make “Heaven on Earth”. The poet Hölderlin said that what made Earth Hell was always that people tried to make it Heaven. (How prophetic if we think of how many millions died for communist ideals of changing society into a classless system in which nobody would be poor. It ended it mass poverty and atrocities of all kinds.)
The humanization of religion into a “charity” is the triumph of materialism in religion … religion becomes just a vessel for feeding the poor: a materialist aim. A Korean Zen master once said starving masses is an ultimately unimportant, trivial fact. It sounds cruel, but it was an attempt to save religion from humanization, from the materialist temptation of seeing it only as a charity. Dahui said “I would rather suffer torments of Hell that present the Buddha-Dharma as a human feeling.” – When I first read this it struck me, it’s a sentence worth considering, it’s an interesting standard. Isn’t Western Buddhism nowadays mostly just about human feelings?
The essence of charity is in giving up objects, projections (possessions), thoughts. So when we “sit” for dhyana, that is charity, since we donate time, delusions (objects, thoughts), for the projectionless. The highest form of charity. Hui-Neng says we are not saved by giving money as charity. Salvation is only in the mind.
Hence as Tozen and you say, “Dharma-ending age” – when people understand “prayer” as “asking God for objects” instead of “giving up objects for God”, and “charity” as a form of socialism, it is indeed Dharma-ending.