Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Celestial Music by Tai Sheridan


Rating: WARTY!

While we're on the celestial plane so to speak, here;s a pile of stinking horseshit festering rancid, wishing it was in the sun.

This is an English translation of Buddhist sutras freely translated by the author. Thus we have vacuous lines like: "The earth s[lits open, everything springs forth, let the lamp blow out, welcome infinite happiness" And "Countless truth seekers, sincere and fearless, clarify the diamond body, wishing benefit for all beings" and "The wisdom of spaciousness is the truthful incomparable mysterious light of existence." You would have exactly the same success by writing a computer program to randomly jam dictionary words together or by writing them on a slip of paper and blindly pulling them from a hat.

I have no problem with viewing the planet as a single entity in which we all have a part, but Buddhism seems like cowardice to me. Searching for inner enlightenment while there are people starving, people homeless, people suffering? No amount of chanting is going to fix that. They don't have the option to contemplate their navel. It's sucked back so close to their spine that they can't even see it. They need helping, not chanting.

I guess the hungry at least they have that empty belly in common with Lord Gautama who, let's not forget, abandoned his wife and child. That's not a recommendation to me. It's neither harmony, nor peace and it sure as hell isn't commingling. There's this belief out there, and blind belief is all it is, that if one million children meditate together it can help to change the world, and they do, yet here we are, in an ongoing global racism crisis and a deadly and devastating plague swarming the globe. Thanks meditators! Let's not fool ourselves. What these people do, they do for themselves. It's not selfless; it's selfish, period.

It's appropriate that this book focuses on sutras of emptiness, because that's what it offers: nothing. I can't commend this wisp of a book or the vacuous poetry it contains.