Jeez, did i see myself here! Thanks so much for taking it to the next step for me, because avoiding right effort is staring at me from the mirror.

I agree with Julia May Jonas’s remarks. I could only watch half the interview – tedious.

This post is Greg Zwahlen endorsed.

Wow. What an amazing post. I loved it. Thanks for the mini-journey!

Unfortunately, the tradition of false over-the-top humility in Buddhism is deeply engrained. Teachers seem to fight each other over who can diss themselves the most.
One effect of this is the disingenuousness of the whole “I’m the worst,” charade. The other is that when Buddhists actually try to say “Hey, I actually have wisdom, insight, and a really good skill set,” other Buddhists tend to call them arrogant, even though our whole society hinges on the ability to present oneself effectively.
I am not the worst Buddhist in the world. I don’t even believe myself to be an average one. I work hard every day to be a pretty good practitioner, a capable human being in my jobs and relationship, and to say I wasn’t would neither seem genuine, nor would it make anyone want to listen to what I had to say.
Thanks for calling the worst horse mentality on its inherent BS, tinder!

Thanks. Someone needed to say it.

Okay, TF I’ve marveled at your brillance and balls too many times. So I will not thank you for this.
I will say 2 things only.
1. I hope this spreads because one of the last buddhist talks I to went was full of this behavior and sadly no dharma.
2. Reviving Ophelia – There are lots of worms in that can. Fun worms.

Oh yeah, Damaris. Reviving Ophelia is fascinating. Next time I’m at my folk’s house I’m going to curl up with my old dog-eared copy and search for signs.

I just went to the library.

My mom loves Mary Pipher (my mom is also a psychologist from Nebraska, so there’s a natural affinity) and was excited to tell me that MP had a book out about being a Buddhist. I’m trying to get through it. So far… it’s kind of a self-centered, repetitive book. Maybe it will open up for me in a bit, but there are many better books by much worse Buddhists.

I’ve probably said this many times on here but I think when getting caught up in this stuff, it’s helpful to come down to the bottom line. The Buddha once said, “I teach one thing and one thing only: Suffering and the end of Suffering.”
Therefore, if there is a way you are relating to the practice which is causing more suffering, why? It’s not about aligning with a specific code of conduct, it’s about relating to life in a way which is adaptive and leads towards happiness for yourself and others. That’s it. It’s so subjective and personal, how could you ever possibly rank yourself?

“I am cultivating my Buddhist self-esteem…” Hmmm What would that entail?
But really, good call all around. Practicing Buddhism isn’t like practicing figure skating with marks given out or like practicing medicine with competency reviews. So why bother with these kinds of coy labels? (except to sell books maybe)
Such “self-confessional” stuff seems to just be game-playing. I met a woman once who prefaced nearly everything she said with “I’m just sooo naughty…” After about the 10th time it got really irritating. I wanted to say “Well stop being so naughty then or stop thinking of yourself in those terms and you won’t have so many issues to carry on about endlessly.” But I don’t think she would have got it. Whoops..tangent there.
Anyways enjoyed the perspective.

@nellalou: I suppose, for me, it entails exactly what you describe in your last paragraph – raising the level of consideration about behavior so that I don’t carry on about or create issues endlessly.

Voli Dublino thinks you are right!

Go TF. This is such a meaty post!
1. Who is Mary Pipher and why is she so important anyway? That whole “I’m the piece of horrible crap . . . at the center of the universe” mentality is tiresome. Whenever I am the “worst” I am a pretty big thing, eh? “I am SO humble I am the humblest one EVAH!” Get over it, Mary P.
3. What’s with trashing Reviving Ophelia?! Time for a feminist vs post-feminist rant tangent!
I never read the book, but as I understand its central thesis, it states that young girls entering puberty are generally pushed to suppress their boisterous noisy selves and talents in school to be “good” girls.
And in my experience, that was 100% true when it was written. Girls WERE called upon in class less often in junior high. Nuns DID tell us not to wave our hands in class. In my private Connecticut high school in the early 80s, the old-school history teacher started every AP history semester by noting that European civilization ended when Switzerland became the last European nation to give women the vote. And he allowed only 3 girls each year to take his classes.
And both I and a boy in my year slammed thru 4 years of Spanish and French in 3 years, respectively, but the school offered him a special AP French class and refused to offer AP Spanish for me because, and they said this outright, as a male student he had a better chance of getting into a top-rate college. (Women had only been admitted to Dartmouth and Princeton probably less than a decade earlier; they were still a minority in most Ivy League schools.) One girl’s dad told her not to enroll in calculus because there was no reason for a woman to study it. In the Reagan ’80s, not the Eisenhower ’50s.
So I can’t slam Reviving Ophelia; when it was written, girls HAD been forced to shut up. Looking back, I realize that’s why I picked a women’s college; there were no guys to be favored there. They had to let us talk; we were the only ones there. I later read that women’s college graduates tend to be more outspoken in mixed-gender groups as well, such as in business. And I wouldn’t say I have a problem being outspoken now. And neither do the women I know who were brought up post-Ophelia. So Ophelia the book may have pop psych-porn flaws, but she looks pretty revived to me.
(Of course now girls face other gender issues. But then, so does everyone.)

Well, I didn’t mean to trash it (although what is trashing if not calling something psychology-porn, so I’ll admit there’s some trashing there). What I remember of Reviving Ophelia was not that it was a stance against girls getting shut down but rather a test case study of various psychological afflictions of girls in their teens. The argument, to me, got lost in the mire of these sexy stories. At the time (and it has been a while) I read the book as entertainment and derived, rather than empowerment, a romanticization of the afflictions it presented. It could have been useful for my parents – I think it would have been. But it also hosted its own share of dangerous stereotypes, in my memory.

Wait a minute perhaps I’ve misunderstood the TF post.
Okay yes she did use pysch-porn term because yes the book is juicy but the book is talking about something valid and still very current.
I’m hoping one of you ladies can blog about this.

Let me be clear – I loved Reviving Ophelia when I read it and I’m eager to read it again.

Oh dear, I’m not a defender of the book, only of its thesis. And,, TF, I love your posts when I read them and am eager to read them again.
In fact, here I am again – LOL.
I must say, I am not at all fond of Mary Pipher’s thesis about being the worst buddhist and deeply grateful you called it as you see it on that topic.
I have been sort of searching on the original sutras outlining the worst horse analogy that Suzuki mentions, as does Dogen, which as far as I can tell might be in “Volume 33 of the Samyukta Agama,” but I can’t find them. Can any better searchers help out?

I think very little of the Samyukta Agama has been translated out of Chinese. But it is more or less equivalent to the Pali Samyutta Nikaya. You can search that here:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/index.html
But the organization is often different, so unfortunately it is probably not in vol 33 of that recension.

Oh I feel your love, ellen – don’t think I don’t. It contradicts my nature to use emoticons, otherwise I would smile, wink, etc.
@Greg Zwahlen: sometimes I think you just string syllables like ni – a – ga – kay – kan – ma – ta – ra – shin – sam – I could go on – together in order to quiet the rabblers down.

i would never! contrary to my nature.

According to the nigayaram katyarisha gyoge, recension number 487, translated by pyukta burlap rapapa, it is not.

Greg Zwahlen makes up Buddhist words and references fake Buddhist texts all the time.
He’s practically the Jorge Luis Borges of Dharma.
He was paying me $10/month not to tell anyone, but with the economic crisis he can’t afford the bribes anymore, so the secret’s out.
Pyukta Burlap Rapapa is a curry, isn’t it? Medium spicy with a hint of coconut?

exactly.

that is like a mishmash of sanskrit and tibetan you have there. nice!

ah HA!
AN 4.113 Patoda Sutta The Goad-stick
Translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
“There are these four types of excellent thoroughbred horses to be….
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an04/an04.113.than.html
boo-yah! or more properly perhaps, Bu ya!!!

So happy to read this post! So well written.
I really couldn’t agree much more and it is only my sometimes strenuously cultivated compassion that keeps me from judging statements like “get over yourself!”
I also read a little something different into the “bad buddhist” part that I think is still tangentially related…
I went to a Dharma Punx retreat with Noah Levine several years ago. It was a transformative experience for me to see that there was this whole world of “bad kids” who were turned towards the Dharma.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette in the little gazebo that was the designated smoking area at the hippie retreat center and there was Noah. I was smoking cigarettes with teacher! Talk about your bad Buddhist! It helped me start to get over this weird concept that I had that being Buddhist meant becoming bland as a bowl of rice.
A few years later I was sitting in an empowerment with my lamas, Tibetan, and through mumbled and heavily accented English I hear “and now is time for the cigarette teaching…” HA! That just cracked me up. I sat there giggling like a bad kid in class and receiving occasional glares. To this day my girlfriend and I crack up when we identify “cigarette teachings”…the ones that are like jokes that most people don’t get.
That kind of “Bad Buddhism”, slightly irreverent, engaged in some precept bending and exploration, and still totally in love with Burning Man and fascinated with American pop-culture…that’s my Buddhism and I don’t think any of the tathagatas will love me any less for it.
Its messy, out of whack, and what I got…and I finally feel ok with who I am mostly, even as I dissolve that on a daily basis…because it just isn’t that important anymore.
Buddhism makes everything a little boring eventually, I think, if you let the practice really do the work…”oh look, I have a personality, what a surprise.”
It seems so very predictable of us, especially in the object loving America, to always measure ourselves against some ideal person, the good Buddhist, and to find ourselves in need of acquiring something else to be good enough. Ho hum, look there it is again.
But as a recipient of the cigarette teachings, I think it is good when we can have conversations that my help us move past our cults of personality.
It seems like this post is another example of the emerging steps away from a rather worn out paradigm of self obsession and representation and toward a perhaps healthier and more entertaining and useful refinement into talking about how the Dharma reveals itself and plays out in our human lives in less self absorbed ways. Continued ruminations about our short-comings seems like a practice of limited benefit.

love love love this post. thank you Julia May Jonas.
As of late, i have been really getting interested in feminism and buddhism. together. in response to the feminist comments here, i think women are still affected, but now, maybe even on a more sly, subtle level. i don’t want to say that as a collective all women have low self-esteem, but i feel as tho its the rule rather than the exception. I’m also not stating that men don’t suffer from this distorted self-image either. i’m just afraid that some people practicing, especially those self-haters as we see Pipher to be, might take egoloessness a little too literally to mean “there is no self, therefore there is nothing to love.” why can’t i just “get over myself?”
So this might be an example of where conTENT might be a bit more important than conTEXT. maybe first its important to look at your view and ideas about yourself before hitting the ultimate “relationship to the self.” What kind of things were you taught about “yourself” when you were younger? Some people were told they weren’t good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, etc, or maybe they were ignored almost entirely, and then these things might translate over into not being a “good enough buddhist.”
I have been reading a book called “Women of Wisdom” by Tsultrim Allione. I got into her because i am concerned about female self-image and the practice, when Tibetan Buddhism has been dominated by males for as long as its been around. The feminine has always been said to have great power, but somehow this hasn’t always translated into the relative world.
These are some spliced quotes of what she says:
“There is a dichotomy between the status of women socially and the religious status female figures hold. The result is low self-esteem in women. I tried to interview Khandro Tsering Chodron…when writing Women of Wisdom. She kept saying ‘i know nothing.’ This is clearly not so, but i came to the conclusion that this was the culturally correct thing for her to say. Had she ‘known anything’ she could, in her cultural context, be considered arrogant. I have never had the experience of an equally qualified male saying this.”
Also,
“Shukseb Jetsun Rigdzin Chonyi Zangmo (1852-1953), the best known of the 20th century yoginis…, made the wish to be reborn as a man.”
and she also goes on to speak about Ayo Khandro (114 year-old female buddhist teacher) being approached by a 14 yr. old incarnate lama, Chogyal Namkhai Norbu asking for teachings. She refused, saying that she was just a simple old woman ‘so how could she give teachings to a renowned young reincarnate lama.’
These are just some examples. Except, Allione points out that there is a real opportunity in the West for women to rise up within the Buddhist community. So, Julia May Jonas, we need more “fiery, sexy Buddhists” like yourself to help point out to others, especially the femmes, that it’s OK to like yourself, heck, even love yourself, and be a pretty good Buddhist too. I always have to (and am sometimes not so adept) at catching my own self-loathing and really it might help to look at where that all started from in the first place….then let it go.