What do we need to do and be aware of in order to better prevent future terrorism? What as individual citizens? What if we are political leaders? What as Dharma practitioners? What as fellow beings? Since we are more than one of these, what to do? How to differentiate between radical Islamists and moderate Muslims? In memoriam and service to those killed and injured in Islamic terrorist bombing in Brussels March 22, 2016.

"Not a single day now goes by without an Islamist suicide bombing, rocket attack, shooting spree, kidnapping or stabbing somewhere in the world.

Consider the past 10 days.

On Sunday, March 13, jihadists sprayed gunfire on sunbathers in Grand Bassam, a resort town in the Ivory Coast popular with Westerners and wealthy Ivorians. The attack, which was claimed by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, killed 16 people, including Burkinabe, Cameroonian, French, German, Ivorian and Malian citizens.

On Monday, March 14, two Palestinians fired on Israelis waiting at a bus stop in Kiryat Arba, in the West Bank, wounding one soldier before Israeli forces killed both. A third Palestinian terrorist rammed his car into an Israeli army vehicle in the area and was shot dead. Israel has suffered a wave of Arab knife-and-car attacks for six months, known as the stabbing intifada.

On Tuesday, March 15, al Qaeda’s Somali franchise, al-Shabaab, kidnapped three Red Crescent aid workers in the country’s southwest, according to local media. The abductions followed al-Shabaab’s seizure of a village in central Somalia, amid a broader Islamist resurgence in the Horn of Africa. The aid workers were freed a day later after local villagers pleaded for their release.

On Wednesday, March 16, a pair of female suicide bombers blew themselves up at a mosque in Nigeria, killing 24. No group has claimed credit, but the bombing took place in Nigeria’s Borno state, the birthplace of Boko Haram, an Islamic State affiliate that is Africa’s most savage terror outfit.

On Thursday, March 17, the stabbing intifada claimed a fresh victim when a pair of Palestinian terrorists jumped and wounded an Israeli soldier with a knife in Ariel, in the West Bank. Israeli security forces killed both assailants.

On Friday, March 18, suspected al Qaeda fighters fired rockets at the Salah gas facility in Algeria. No one was injured, but BP and Norwegian oil giant Statoil, which operate the facility, withdrew some staff and suspended operations.

On Saturday, March 19, a bomb went off in a tony shopping district of Istanbul, killing three Israelis (two of whom were U.S. citizens) and one Iranian, and wounding 39 others. This was the fifth mass-casualty terrorist bombing in Turkey in as many months, most of them claimed by or attributed to Islamic State. The same day, a mortar assault on a checkpoint in El-Arish, Egypt, killed 15 policemen. A Sinai-based Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility.

On Sunday, March 20, al-Shabaab overran a Somali military base just 28 miles from the capital, Mogadishu, killing at least one person and seizing several vehicles. Also on Sunday, the Istanbul governorate canceled a hotly anticipated soccer match after receiving “serious intelligence” regarding a planned terror attack.

On Monday, March 21, Islamist fighters likely affiliated with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb targeted a hotel in the capital of Mali, Bamako, that houses a European Union military-assistance mission. EU personnel were unharmed, and one attacker was killed by hotel security.

Brussels was the first major terrorist incident in the West since November’s jihadist killing spree in Paris and December’s in San Bernardino, Calif. You could create a calendar like this one that stretches back for weeks and months, and the above doesn’t even include the civil wars and humanitarian calamities in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan."

What are appropriate and skillful responses to this ongoing terrorism?

The source of the above list and further discussion of the same is at:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/global-jihads-deadly-calendar-1458688588?mod=djemMER

And here are several perspectives on the ISIS response to the bombing:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/isis-propaganda-brussels/475002/ 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3505268/ISIS-celebrate-Brussels-terror-attack-handing-sweets-residents-Syria.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/brussels-attacks-terrorism-isis/474858/

And here is a suggested action plan;

Unite to Defeat Radical Jihadism - It will require Western elites to form an alliance with the citizens they’ve long disrespected.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-defeat-radical-jihadism-1458862004

There is a lack of scientific evidence of the danger of GMO products. Nevertheless, if we as individuals wish not to use GMO products based on what we know, need and feel, that is our choice. However, if our opposition to GMO products for others leads to malnutrition, suffering and starvation, that is another matter and worthy of our reflection of our actions and the consequences thereof. Below are excerpts from a speech by the president of a major agricultural college, Purdue Univerity, at the US Agriculture Department’s Agricultural Outlook Forum in Arlington, Va., Feb. 25, 2016. Following this is a fascinating article about the potentials of CRISPR. Also, a legal case against GM Salmon.

“The attack on GMO technology is the most blatant anti-science of the age, but it is far worse than that,” Purdue University President Mitch Daniels on Thursday (Feb. 25) said. “Lives are at stake, and while scientists, regulators and business people are naturally reluctant to fight back, it’s morally irresponsible not to.”

Daniels cited projections by the United Nations that the global population is expected to grow to more than 9 billion people in 2050, generating a 70 percent increase in the demand for food. He described GMOs as the best hope to ensure the world’s poor have access to an affordable and nutritious diet.

“Thousand of studies and trillions of meals consumed prove the safety of biotechnologies,” he said. “We would never withhold medications with a safety record like that, and it’s just as wrong and just as anti-scientific to do so for food.”

"The threat this time is internal. It will be a self-inflicted wound. What is troubling me, and I hope troubles you, is that there is a shockingly broad, and so far shockingly successful, movement that threatens this important ascent of humankind out of the condition that has plagued us since we first walked upright: of having enough food to meet the most basic, the most elementary need of any living species. That threatens our ascent by choking off the very technologies that could make that next great triumph possible.

I suggest to you that you have a positive duty to do things that probably do not come naturally, to contest and refute junk science and false claims against the technologies that offer so much promise to the world. And not solely on the polite objective grounds that come most naturally to folks in the pursuits represented here, to people who work in the regulation of agriculture and its products, to those who study academically these subjects and work on the new technologies and the policies around them, or to the businesses that produce these products as the technologies become available.

We are used to and only comfortable with polite and civil dialogue: PowerPoints, facts, data at meetings where people have agreed, at least tacitly, to follow the facts where they lead. That is not this argument. We are dealing here, yes, with the most blatant anti-science of the age. But it is worse than that. It is inhumane and it must be countered on that basis. Those who would deny with zero scientific validity the fruits of modern agricultural research to starving or undernourished people—or those who will be, absent great progress—need to be addressed for what they are, which is callous, which is heartless, which is cruel."


Sources for the above are:

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q1/purdue-president-mitch-daniels-calls-on-leaders-to-counter--anti-gmo-falsehoods.html

http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-mitch-daniels-on-anti-gmo-cruelty-1458340376

And here is an outstanding article about newer methods. It is about new gene-editing tool, CRISPR, that is sweeping agriculture.This method can transform the debate over genetic modification. Here it is:

https://research.ncsu.edu/ges/files/2015/11/sci-american.pdf

A legal case against GM Salmon:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/lawsuit-challenges-fdas-right-to-approve-genetically-modified-animals-1459431182 

 

Medications save lives and reduce suffering. What are the best ways to make them available? Here is an interesting excerpt from a response to the election year proposals:

"President Obama’s latest budget includes proposals—echoed or one-upped on the presidential-campaign trail by Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton—that would require pharmaceutical companies to release data on the cost of research and development (R&D) and the extent of discounts offered to insurers for each drug brought to market. Yet the key numbers already are disclosed freely—and we know how to get better value from medicines and improve their affordability to patients.

The company I lead, Lilly, discloses its annual R&D spending in audited financial statements every year, like other public companies. Lilly’s number for 2015 was $4.8 billion—part of the $50 billion invested in R&D each year by the members of our industry association alone. That’s more than 20% of all R&D spending by all U.S. businesses. Seen against that staggering total, the proposal to mandate the nearly impossible task of assembling drug-by-drug R&D-spending figures misses the whole point.

Pharmaceutical companies’ R&D feeds innovation from the earliest identification of leads through to clinical trials, real-world data collection and the refinement of existing treatments. It includes the cost of myriad failures—part of every scientific enterprise—along with further research on approved medicines, right up to their patent expirations. Money made on the sale of today’s new medicines feeds all of the indispensable streams in this complex ecosystem.

Averages are easy enough to come by—a new academic study in the Journal of Health Economics says it takes about $2.6 billion in R&D investment per new medicine launched. Calculating a precise number for an individual product is quite another matter. Consider Lilly’s investment of billions of dollars in R&D related to Alzheimer’s disease over the last quarter century. Since there are several candidates in our pipeline that emerged from past work, to which future product and in what proportion should these costs be allocated? And to what end?

The key insight is beyond dispute. Developing medicines is risky, expensive and time-consuming, and everyone would be better off if it were less so. Rather than meaningless disclosure mandates, policy efforts instead should encourage whatever can be done, without compromising patient safety, to shave precious weeks off development and regulatory-approval timelines."

For the rest of this article and comments to it, see:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/an-empty-obama-clinton-sanders-plan-on-drug-costs-1458601547?mod=djemMER

Danger - A Dharma Talk 3-20-16

http://prairiezen.org/Sunday_audio.html

All Gold

Elihu Genmyo Smith

 

Zazen is experiencing life – what we like, what we do not like, what feels good, what is painful, what is “ours” or “not-ours”, what “should be” or “should-not-be”. At times this is most difficult, uncomfortable and painful because of how strongly we hold to and believe or reject and despise circumstances, hold to what we like, what we do not like, what feels good, what is painful, what is “ours” or “not-ours”, what “should be” or “should-not-be”.

Ongoing zazen, ongoing zazen practice in the many forms of our life, enables and supports experiencing this life openness right now, being the emptiness of myriad forms, this always so manifesting right now in standing, sitting, talking, working, sadness, happiness, gain, loss, pain, fear.

An analogy we can use to help in ongoing practice is seeing the many forms and functioning of our life as all forms of gold – compassionate actions is gold, angry speech is gold, sickness gold, energetic strength gold, fear is gold, joy is gold. My teacher Maezumi Roshi said his teacher Yasuatni Roshi used this analogy as a way to speak of Prajna wisdom, a way to speak of emptiness that is the truth of our life. Of course, speaking of this is not the same as being this, living this.

Zazen is experiencing, is sitting still upright in the midst of experiencing as is, openness as this ongoing changing body-mind-universe manifesting in many forms and conditions.
Our habit often is to react to arising circumstance, inside outside this moment, with seemingly natural like-dislike, physically and mentally reacting, going towards or against, adding on or judging. We may refuse to accept, much less embrace, and be this intimacy life moment.

In zazen we suspend activity out of reactive habits, release this reactive habit when it arises and/or notice this, experiencing this, being arising-passing, using what supports us in sitting this open experiencing, open responding.

This opening-to is physical, mental, emotional and any of the many other ways we particularly function. This is upright stillness, whether in formal sitting or in the many forms of our daily life, standing, lying down and so forth – and is supported by the forms of daily life ongoing practice. This is ours to be, ongoing practice of many forms.

Our zazen is discovering and letting go of the particular habitual body-mind chatter reaction when we cannot accept this moment, refuse to be/do right now– enabling us to awaken right now, to be awake right now, manifesting wisdom prajna gold of life right now.

Letting go of any wisdom prajna gold, we are all together just here – there is no gold, there is no gold separate from form, there is no form separate from gold; emptiness is exactly form, form is exactly emptiness; emptiness exactly emptiness, gold exactly gold, form exactly form. Gold is ordinary, nothing special. Forgetting is manifesting this moment here.

Master Dogen says, “Mind itself is Buddha” and he says “one mind is all things, all things are one mind” (Sokushin Zebutsu).

Master Dogen also quotes the following dialogue between Masters Yangshan and Guishan – “What is wondrous clear mind? “It is mountains, rivers and the earth, it is the sun, moon and stars.”

So I say, exactly your life this moment; please take good care of this.

© 2016 Elihu Genmyo Smith

Entrusting

Elihu Genmyo Smith

 

Everyone you meet is entrusting their life to you. Everything you meet is entrusting their life to you. Every circumstance of myriad beings is entrusting life to you.

This is the neighbor you greet in the morning, the tree you walk by, your breakfast, others on the crowded bus and the phone call at work.

Everyone you meet is entrusting their Buddhahood to you. Everything you meet is entrusting Buddhahood to you. Every circumstance of myriad beings is entrusting Buddha Dharma to you. 

They need not know of this entrusting nor acknowledge this entrusting. And it is up to you to respond appropriately to this meeting, to the Buddha you meet, to the myriad moment circumstance Dharma you live, independent of what you “know”, of what they “know”, independent of what you they do not know.

And you are entrusting them, each them you meet, entrusting them with your life, entrusting them with your Buddhahood, with Buddha Dharma.

Your life is this moment, this response; your manifesting ongoing change is this response.

Of course, there is no Buddhahood, not yours, not anyone else’s, not anything else’s. So we speak of Buddhahood, speak of Buddha Dharma. This, right here now, not-two. Your life right here is the Dharma, your life right here is the life of Buddha.

Your response is what is so, your response reveals and liberates this moment, reveals for you and for all others. This is fulfilling vows of liberating all beings, liberating all Buddhas - whether “knowing” this or not, whether you, they, “know” this or not.

What determines this moment is your response, experiencing, doing, non-doing, your ongoing practice life. The actions or knowing of others is not the determinant of this moment, of this practice response. Neither is your “knowing” the determinant of this practice response – “knowing”, figuring out, understanding, at times these blind and hinder us. What is needed is present moment functioning, present moment experiencing, the skillful and appropriate practice response.

Please do not hold to beliefs that experiencing is inside or outside, do not believe experiencing is mine or another’s. Do you believe otherwise? If so, please notice this.

What are you to do? Your everyday activities, your everyday openness, is this opportunity, your opportunity; washing your face, cleaning dirty dishes, listening and responding to a friend, driving in crowded traffic with those who speed, with those cutting in and out. You are entrusting them, giving self away to them, forgetting self, being awakened by them, by this particular moment.

What about those you do not like, with what is uncomfortable or troublesome circumstances, much less painful? How is this at meetings with colleagues who vehemently disagree with you? It is easy to be open with friends and relatives who are loving, kind and generous, though even here we are often not present, are self-absorbed, so that we miss this moment, this entrusting. Are you holding “past” in the present, blinding this moment? Look. Does holding blind you? Are your expectations driving you right now to miss this moment? These are your practice friends when you notice.

How is it with friends, relatives, when they are boorish or inconsiderate? When they are demanding or annoying? With offensive events, when fearful or even appalled? These too are entrusting this life moment, this Buddhahood, to us, whether they know this or not, whether we know this or not. What is your response? Not in some stereotypical way but as called for right now - this is your wholehearted life.

The Lotus Sutra chapter 20 is about the “Never Disrespectful Bodhisattva” who acknowledged and bowed to everyone he met, saying “I will never disrespect you, you are all to become Buddha.” Some hated this and attacked him verbally or physically. Even as “Never Disrespectful Bodhisattva” retreats, runs from them and their attacks, he bows and says “I will never disrespect you… you are all to become Buddha.”

Please understand this genuinely, not as some fantasy, some nicey-nice rules of how we should be, much less rules or ideas we wish to impose on others. If we impose rules or ideas on others or our self we may become angry or worse when they, or we, do not meet expectations.

What is “never disrespectful?”

What is responding right now, being open? What is the genuine responding of “never disrespectful?”

Being this moment as is is this life, this opportunity right now. What is acknowledging and nurturing this moment ongoing change, this Buddha Nature? Opportunity is moment, moment.

For you, as your ongoing life practice, what nurtures and supports experiencing your-our-life? What does advancing myriad circumstances call for?

Please reflect on this, let this be the base of life, of your functioning, especially when you are disturbed by circumstances, caught-up in reactive habits.

This experiencing, this noticing, this responding, grows naturally out of ongoing practice, manifests naturally ongoing zazen in myriad forms. This is our opportunity. And we must make our efforts.

What nurtures forgetting self, giving self away? Look closely. In this circumstance moment, what is entrusting your life, entrusting Buddha Dharma, entrusting the Buddhahood of the whole universe to this moment, to experiencing-responding?

Entrusting is forgetting self, awakening by myriad dharmas, being confirmed in manifesting myriad dharmas.

In your life today, what is the functioning myriad dharmas? What is not-two here? What is not-knowing now? Please reflect upon this, please live this. Taste and experience your life right now.

Yours is able-being-response, yours is response – ability.

© 2016 Elihu Genmyo Smith

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Who guards the people from the "guardian" governmental officials? Is this a lens through which we should evaluate for whom we vote?

Below is an interesting recent article regarding a topic which I have written about before, the tyranny of administrative officials who are not elected by the people and seem to operate without any or with limited legislative statute to impose their will upon the public.

"Philip Hamburger—a Columbia law professor and author of the 2015 book “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?”—defines the administrative state as the substitution of regulatory edicts for laws passed by the people’s elected representatives. In the American iteration, at least, this often means the same federal agency that writes the rules also enforces and adjudicates them—a confluence of powers Madison once called the “very definition of tyranny.

Mr. Hamburger maintains that the threat of the administrative state is nothing new, notwithstanding the assumption of some conservatives who would date it to the progressive theories of Woodrow Wilson or the rise of the New Deal. By contrast, Mr. Hamburger says the Founders well understood this threat, familiar as they were with English constitutional history and the centuries-long struggle to limit the extralegal prerogatives of kings (Star Chambers anyone?).

Here are a few instances from recent years:

• In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, the IRS targets groups regarded as enemies of the president—pro-Israel, pro-life, pro-tea-party, etc. When this became public, its officials, including the new IRS commissioner, John Koskinen, make clear their contempt for congressional panels trying to investigate.

• In a frontal assault on religious liberty, the Department of Health and Human Services issues a mandate that would force the Little Sisters of the Poor, Catholic nuns who run homes for the elderly poor, to offer their employees contraceptives the sisters regard as a violation of their faith. They are threatened with fines of $100 per employee per day if they refuse, which adds up to $70 million a year—equal to about a third of their operating budget.

• Andy Johnson builds a pond on his Wyoming property to provide water for his horses and cattle after securing all the required local and state permits. The Environmental Protection Agency steps in and accuses him of violating the Clean Water Act (even though he in fact has created a wetlands) and orders him to undo what he’d done—or face fines of $37,500 per day. As Mr. Johnson fights, he has racked up accumulated fines of $20 million."

The question becomes, is this an area in which we should evaluate our candidates for public office? Especially our Presidential candidates? The article explores this at length:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillarys-soft-despotism-1457998195

Noting that this article is published on the Ides of March, the day associated with purported end of Roman democracy through the assassination of Julius Caesar, the comment section for this article shows the strength of conviction and partisanship around this issue.