livin' the values

Today after the regular zazen sitting, we did the jukai ceremony for a student visiting from Sweden. Jukai is the ceremony of receiving the Buddhist Precepts and marks the formal beginning of one's start as a Buddhist layman.
The precepts were originally the rules for the community of Buddha's original followers. Whenever you have a group of people living together, there will always be issues, disputes, and problems. Rules help keep the society running smoothly.
At one time there were hundreds of rules, but they have basically been pared down to the main 16.
First are the Three Devotions:

1. Devotion to Buddha; the founder of Buddhism
   
2. Devotion to Dharma; the Universe itself
3. Devotion to Sangha; our companions in life

Next are the Three Universal Precepts:

1. Observance of rules; follow the rules of society
   
2. Observance of morality; act appropriately in all situations -- act right
3. Salvation of all living beings; we are all elements of the Universe

The above six are pretty touchy-feely, so the next ten really spell out in concrete terms what's what. These are the Ten Fundamental Precepts, but really they're more like guidelines:

1. Don't destroy life
2. Don't steal
3. Don't desire too much
4. Don't lie
5. Don't live by selling liquor
6. Don't discuss failures of Buddhist priests and laymen
7. Don't praise yourself or berate others
8. Don't begrudge the sharing of Buddhist teachings and other things, but give them freely
9. Don't become angry
10. Don't abuse the three supreme values; Buddha Dharma, and Sangha.

It is not a sin to break them, and there is no penance for erasing the sin. There is no one telling you what you can and cannot do, and nothing to keep you from doing whatever you want, save yourself.

During the ceremony you do a bunch of prostrations and repeat a bunch of stuff three times, and then finally you receive your rakusu and your Buddhist name and a copy of the Buddhist lineage from Buddha down through all his disciples, with your name written in last.

Nishijima-sensei made an appearance and he really is a pleasant little guy. Whole thing took about 40 minutes, but add an hour to that to fold up all the robes and put away the alter table and other apparatus.

Buddhism is the ultimate self-help methodology; it's all up to you. There are others to guide and help you, but ultimately you sit on your cushion every day and it's you and your thoughts and your life. It's your responsibility to deal with your own issues and live as you choose. Some people choose to hide from reality through alcohol or drugs or television. Some people make everything someone else's fault; mean boss, uncaring parents, uncaring society. Certainly there are people in the world who aren't helping you, and there's nothing you can do about them. You can, however, do something about how you live your own life.
Someone asked me "how can you be so positive all the time?" which I thought was a silly observation, since I don't think I'm a happy, bubbly optimist. I am a realist though; I know what I can and cannot do. I get upset when things don't go my way or when someone isn't helping, and then I do what I can about it; I get my job done, I cover for the other person, I try to make it right. Not because I'm the hero or want all the praise or because I'm always the smartest but because that's the right thing to do.
And if it's say something at work, I do my job and when I'm done I go home and play with my daughter or go into the dojo or sit in zazen or look at stupid crap on the internet.
It's my life, I can think it's miserable and everyone's out to get me, or I can make the best of it and deal with it and have as much fun as I can.
Zazen is just a way of forcing you to sit quietly, you and your thoughts, to realize that all the crap inside your head is just yours; no one stuck a syringe full of bad thoughts and jammed it into your brain. You put those thoughts into your head, you're the only one who can deal with them and take them out.

mostly almost done!

OK most of the boxes are gone, the phone and security system are hooked up, and the wireless network is in full effect.
P reorganized the kitchen and I did the bathroom drawers. She's now working on the closet as my clothes have been relegated to the other room until she separates winter stuff from summer and gets rid of the will-never-wear bits.
I've the The Smallwood on the job to help me replace the TV with a nice plasma; something in the 37-42 inch range will be fine, and no tuner necessary as I got a cable box, so just a dumb monitor will work.
Last night I discovered what some of The Mystery Switches do. Some, like in the bathroom and kitchen, turn on the floor-level heater to keep one's toes toasty in winter. Others apparently control the night lights, but all of the night lights save the one by the entrance don't seem to work. Perhaps the bulb is burnt, but I can't see how to open it without ripping the whole unit off of the wall, so I emailed the maintenance corp and they're going to send someone out.
Been cold and rainy these past couple of days, so I've cranked on the central heater in every room -- I mean, I'm paying for it anyway right! So bourgeois of me!

subprime, yup

As a follow up to my diatribe previously, I see that Bloomberg columnist Michael Lewis agrees with me.

moved (mostly)

Only three boxes of stuff left to unpack. In sum:
We have too many clothes and magazines, and not enough shelves and closet space.
Plenty of space in the kitchen and everywhere else.
Living room is currently full of empty boxes, and everything is hooked up except for the phone line and security system.
Highlight of the move was the cable guy. He ended up hanging out for over an hour and we set up the whole audio-visual system. Sadly my old TV is so big I have to sit it on the floor as I don't have any furniture burly enough to support its weight. Reckon that means it's time to buy a new (lightweight!) flat-panel TV.

neighbors

neighbors
Originally uploaded by renfield.

Our upstairs neighbors include two adorable South African sisters, 10 and 5. Tonchan's got babysitters!

moving time!

moving time!
Originally uploaded by renfield.

deep thoughts

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Originally uploaded by renfield.

Tonchan deep in thought...what next to eat? Left or right breast? When best to poop? To nap, or to chew on the pillow?
Tackling the difficult issues of our time.

lunch @ asterix

lunch @ asterix
Originally uploaded by renfield.

entirely not right

I have neither pity nor tolerance for whiny investors. I have even less patience for this sensationalist "news". Note the opening line; obviously it's the big banks' fault. Never mind the fact that Buck invested his entire life savings in a risky bond "yielding 10 times the going rate on Treasury bills". Think about that for a minute. This man bought an "uninsured money market note" that paid ten times more than a boring yet safe government bond. Uninsured. Ten times. RISKY. Did he not bother to actually read the terms of the bond? He even admits that he should not have put all of his eggs in one basket. First rule of investing: diversify.
So let me understand this: a guy has $300,000 from the sale of his old house, but still has to pay the mortgage on his new place, his wife was planning to retire (serious reduction in income), knows the importance of diversification, gets greedy when he sees the possibility of making ten times the going rate...and then it's not his fault when he loses his money?
Or how about Mr. Russel:

He knows the 13 percent interest rates should have been a warning. ``If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is,'' he said.

And yet knowing that, he still invested and lost $170,000. And whose fault is that?
Or Mr. English who invested "decades of savings" who "saw it as an alternative to the interest rate I could get from a bank." Money in the bank is saving, dumping your savings into risky bonds and then whining about it is just stupid. He wanted to use the money to pay for his three kids' college, so why not invest in a low-risk, long-term 529 college fund? He wanted to use the money to buy a new car, so why not use them money as a down payment for a car lease or loan? He wanted to use the money for a second honeymoon, so why not gamble it in Vegas?
At least Mr. Funk is honest. He lost $70,000 and says he "became too confident and too greedy as the high-yielding notes continued to pay." And yet somehow, "the Wall Street firms were greedy too, yet didn't pay a price for it."
Didn't pay a price for it?
Over 20 bankruptcies across the industry, and who do you think has invested the most in them?
Mortgage Lenders Network goes bankrupt, Merrill Lynch has $36.6 million in financing claimed.
ResMae goes bankrupt, may have to buy back $166 million in bad loans sold to Merrill Lynch.
New Century insolvent, owes $1.5 billion each to Morgan Stanley and UBS.
But forget the money that Wall Street loses. Think about the money it invests. It is the big Wall Street houses stepping in to fund, refinance, or outright purchase these failing businesses. Someone steps in, takes the risk, and tries to rebuild these businesses, keep the people working, keep the mortgages flowing.
Wall Street is not the enemy, and it is no one's responsibility to protect stupid, greedy investors from themselves.

all in the knees

10 people in practice last night, so not much space on the floor. I wasn't in much of a mood to move around, so we practiced really basic stuff; standing, sitting, standing up again. Trying to figure out how standing straight up from sitting and stepping forward from sitting are basically the same movement, the only thing that changes is how much closer you do or don't get to the guy in front of you trying to kill you. Also working on trimming the fat; cutting out unnecessary movement to be left with nothing but the basics. It pays to be lazy!
After class I had to go back to the office for a call with NY, didn't get home until 11:30. The hard life of a salaryman.

late night conference calls...

...suck.

hana matsuri

hana matsuri
Originally uploaded by renfield.

ubuntu

Last time I tried installing Linux on my laptop, it was a nightmare. Wireless card wouldn't work, screen resolution was off, sleep mode and power control were crap. That was then, this is now. I downloaded, burned onto CD, and installed Ubuntu 6.06 on my Dell Latitude D400.
I would love to brag about how I had to recompile the kernel and hack all kindsa cool deep, technical settings to optimize the OS, but alas it was delightfully simple. I booted from the CD, clicked on Tokyo, and installed. Wireless PCMCIA card was recognized, software installed, everything worked. And the machine is FAST. Boots and runs way snappier than Windows ever did.
Struggled a bit to upgrade Firefox to a 2.x version, but after some googling I found a simple install script that ran all the package install and registration stuff. And now it works.
A couple more years of innovation like this, and I could even get my mom to use Linux.

noah's ark #301

Got the keys to the new Kuroda Household, aka apartment 301 in Noah's Ark. This place is by all definitions the La Bomba. Utility with side load combo washer/dryer. Mucho closet space. Central air and heating. Massive BBQ balcony. South wall of windows. Living room big enough for futsal. Killer Japanese room.
Amusing to note that the master bedroom alone is larger than the first apartment P and I used to live in.
We move in April 15!

nekkid!

P1000611.JPG
Originally uploaded by renfield.

Photos she'll be embarrassed about when she's older.

@ davids deli

@ davids deli
Originally uploaded by renfield.

Took Emy and Dolf to lunch and then we took a long walkabout. First went to Shibuya to check out the fabric store, and then stopped by Bic Camera to see the various toys. After that we walked up to Harajuku and checked out the cool kids getting their photos taken, then walked up to Omotesando and through Aoyama. We took a taxi through Aoyama Cemetery and saw the cherry blossoms, then had bevvies at Starbucks Tsutaya and walked home through Moto Azabu.

Took a little break at home, then headed up to Azabu Jyuban for Korean BBQ at Sankoen.

oyako (parent & child)

oyako (parent & child)
Originally uploaded by renfield.

Genetics. There is no escape.

sakura

sakura
Originally uploaded by renfield.

Walked home from Shibuya station. Gotta love warm spring nights, with all the cherry trees along Meiji Dori in full bloom.

police movie party

sting party
Originally uploaded by renfield.

Jer hooked me up with invites to the movie release party for Everyone Stares and I got there just in time to catch the last 5 seconds of Stuart's drum session. But I was really there to see Jer's folks Ilene and Derek, who were taking the movie on a global release tour. Hadn't seen then in about 5 years, since I was in West Hollywood last time. Great catching up with them! Too bad Jer couldn't join us. Ilene was particularly jealous that my mom has a grand daughter but, despite the fact that she's got three sons she has no grand kinds yet. However a many-branching family tree leaves lots of optionality, and they are yet young...No pressure, guys.

Afterwards grabbed some food with The Edo and reminisced about the good old Chiba days. Been in Japan for going on 13 years now...damn. Remember back in the day?

Had a good practice this evening. First, I managed to show up almost on time -- we started about 7:30 and trained for a good 1.5 hours. There a shiny fresh beginner on the floor (her second class) so I had her go through the basic basics whilst the rest of the class did their typical thing. At some point the theme became (I never manage to figure out what we're practicing until we start and get well into it) moving from one's center. There are lots of fancy ways to describe this, and several really, really talented martial artists who have perfected it (Kuroda Tetsuzan, etc.) but I like to keep things simple. The basic ideas are: stay balance at all times, reduce all unnecessary movement, remain flexible. All three are linked, and really one can't be done without the other two.
Staying balanced means just that; don't wobble like you're going to fall over. Keep your upper body over your lower body (or keep your lower body under your upper body.) Be aware of your left and right, your front and back, and whichever direction you move, make sure all your parts are cooperating, otherwise you end up swaying, tilting, dragging.
Reducing all unnecessary movement leads to the surprising yet ultimately intuitive conclusion that many things you do with your body to get it acting are really pointless. Straightening the ankle, forcing the foot to push off the ground and drive the leg/hip/body forward is a really silly way to start taking a step. Why use such a small muscle in the ankle to move the whole body? Instead, just keep the leg relaxed, pick it up using the large muscles in the butt and thigh, and get it moving from the hip. After that, the whole body will follow. The corollary is: use big muscles for big movements, small muscles for small movements. To take a step forwards, use the butt, thigh, and hips. To swing the sword, use the back and hips. To adjust the angle of the kissaki a millimeter, use the fingers and wrist. Also, you need to use the whole body together as one. In order to bring the sword overhead, if you're already stepping forward, you are in a sense stepping under your sword already, so there's no need to use the arm the bring the sword over your head, too. Use the wrist and arm to get the sword moving back, in conjunction with the body moving forwards.
Finally, flexibility is key to acting and reacting. The human body is really, really bad at staying still. Anything other than positions of natural rest are hard to keep; opposing muscles fight each other to tighten and stretch in opposite directions. Instead of trying to be rock embedded in the floor, be molten lava, dune of sand, flowing river, tempestuous wind. Even standing water in a calm lake is fluid; try grabbing a handful of it. Much harder than grabbing ice cubes. Being flexible starts with the knees; keep them bent and more importantly, bending. In order to keep the hips stable (giving you a good platform from which to move), the lower body needs to be like coiled springs or shock absorbers. No matter how the body moves, the knees must bend or straighten in order to keep the body balanced and moving efficiently.
Also, tension in muscles causes fatigue, and makes it harder to move in different directions; a tightly bent arm is tough to bend more, and really isn't a very good starting point for straightening out either. Tension in muscles usually means tension in demeanor, too. Staying flexible of body and mind means not expecting anything, and therefore means you are able to react to anything, to move in any direction.
Keeping the mind calm keeps the body supple; keeping the body relaxed quites the mind.