Purnachandra

 Admiral Diamond

 Name   PURNACHANDRA....

The Code.

Thusness is clear,

So this is our view,

We do not transgress this,

So this is our samaya,

We do not take it up or reject it,

So this is our practice.

Our self-evidence is indivisible.

This is our mandala.

We attain self-empowerment.

This is empowerment.

It is spontaneously realized,

So it is our good work.

We are not distracted,

So this is our samadhi.

The pirate code was stolen by two pirates - Sri Singha and Vairochana - who broke into the palace by night where they broke the seals and stole the books. These particular books were put under lock and key by the King, because of some disturbance involving a prostitute and a nun. The translation of the books into English, by another pirate with the initials C.W., were on my desk and I was thinking about the pirates’ code for some time, and there it was written on the back of the book. So I stole it.

The Commodore.

Some time ago Rinpoche was invited to the Disney World in Anaheim California. We went with a small group. Rinpoche went on one or two rides -The Haunted House and the Jungle Boat ride. But he insisted on going on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride over and over again, drinking sake from a large coke-a-cola bottle, and singing:

Yo Ho,  Yo Ho,

A Pirates life for me,

We pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot,

Drink up me 'earties,

Yo Ho.

We were all encouraged to sing along,

Some- time after, Rinpoche said, "Major, we should have a navy".  I said, “yes”, thinking more of Hornblower. "I will be the head. What is that called?" asked Rinpoche. "Admiral" I replied. "And you can be the second in command. What is that rank?" "Commodore" I said. 

And so it was.

Black Dog, Billy Bones, The Bo’sun, and Wee Georgie

Purnachandra in Nova Scotia

Paradox School Pirates

Master and Commander Bill Gilkerson and his consort, Master and Commander Kerstin (the Viking) Gilkerson

Sir Ashley Playfair-Howes writes from Mexico.

It was extremely muggy here and after 3 months of lock-down - and before it locks down again it looks like after opening up for only 2-3 weeks - we bolted up into the mountains about 100 miles away but a four hour drive, to a tiny village 7,000 feet or more up with a nicely painted Welcome sign announcing that this is the place of the little children, the magic mushrooms.

 To make a long story short, on the advice of our hotel hostess, we went into the village the next day to an old lady and her sons in a very modest dwelling in the town center. At first she told us to go away. When we accepted the message gracefully, then she invited us in and very soon thereafter her son offered to go find us some mushrooms which he did, delivering them to our cabin a couple of hours later. The price was $15.00 but I paid $25.00. Some people feel it is a violation to buy or sell them. I understand. But I appreciate help from people who know what they are doing in a local area, and am glad we did it that way.

Anyway, we drove back the next day so as to take them here on the hill before they rotted. The son - and our mushroom intermediary - said that when people bring them down from the mountains to the coast the mushrooms get angry. Marina doesn't approve of these things very much and tried to persuade me not to take them. After getting her yesterday I considered it for a while, the I-Ching gave me 2 leading to 7 which felt like a solid green light, so I took them soon after awakening and had a thoroughly peaceful, deeply illuminating journey, seeing dragons in delicate swirling gossamer thin multi-dimensional cloud formations which reached out to touch me, hovering above our hill a long time, then I spent an hour or two learning about the valley, its key mountains, valleys, hidden areas, plateaus, old sacrificial sites, extraordinary rainbow-like lights shining down through a bright sunlit sky illuminating some of those key spots, a tree told me that he had to be taken out of the pot and planted, and where to plant him, and also sort of other things showed their faces, the entire valley rippling in the silent language of plant and land form that moves with the mind in marvelous patterns that arise thanks to the intermediary agency of the mushrooms who join elemental and living organisms minds so beautifully. Leaves, insects, trees waving, birds. clouds hovering over certain mountains, unmoving for hours, all communicating whatever it is they are communicating in a language one understands without understanding. 

In short, a very nice time.

 Captain Ennis of the ship Gryphon

Sir Ashley Playfair-Howes adds: The Pirate’s Salute

Comrades in Arms, Makers of Mischief

Bright Morning Glory, Ever-Fresh Sun!

One is the Army, the other is Navy

One is Enlightened, the other a Pawn.

[Chorus:]

Love is the story our hearts overflowing

Love is the ending and love lasts right through

Love is beginning and love is the glory

Love is the gift that I hand on to you!

Glory is golden and hearts blaze forever;

Lost is the gaze in horizons of yore;

You tell the story and I’ll get cervezas,

You line your pockets and I’ll fill the drawers!

[Chorus:]

Love is the story our hearts overflowing

Love is the ending and love lasts right through

Love is beginning and love is the glory

Love is the gift that I hand on to you!

All is in motion and all is a miracle

Sunsets and sunrise profusion galore;

God gives us glory we spy from our binnacles

Long life and happiness passed down from yore.

[Chorus:]

Love is the story our hearts overflowing

Love is the ending and love lasts right through

Love is beginning and love is the glory

Love is the gift that I hand on to you!

I’ll see your canvas, your paintbrush your writing

And raise you a dream and a golden pink dawn

There is no need for us all to be fighting

Here on this world where we’ll all soon be gone!

[Chorus:]

Love is the story our hearts overflowing

Love is the ending and love lasts right through

Love is beginning and love is the glory

Love is the gift that I hand on to you!

Karmapa’s meditation for the anniversary of Shamar Rinpoche’s parinirvana

June 11, 2020

Thaye Dorje, His Holiness the 17th Gyalwa Karmapa, shares the following meditation on 11 June, the anniversary of the parinirvana of Mipham Chökyi Lodrö, His Holiness the 14th Kunzig Shamar Rinpoche, according to the Western calendar.

The awakened ones never ventured anywhere else. 

The unawakened ones never came from anywhere else. 

The string of endless beginnings is just a figment.

The string of endless finales is just a figment, too.

If it’s comforting to accept this, then one can do that. 

What is in-between the endless beginnings and the endless finales?

Is it not that the in-between is also just a figment? 

So, nothing really goes or comes. 

All there is is just cycles of figments.

The awakened ones set sail on this beginningless current of the ocean. 

They have no purpose for themselves to sail.

To them ports are as relative as islands or lands. Islands and lands are as dynamic as the ocean – they only move slower. So it makes no sense to the awakened ones to believe ports and shores to be static. 

They just sail. 

If a purpose is truly required to be shown in their sailing then that is that they sail only for the benefit of unawakened ones. 

The unawakened ones are sailing too, in a way. However, due to their slumber they aren’t aware or they aren’t certain that they are sailing. They feel more of a drifting sensation, yet at times, every now and then, a sense of sailing appears in flashes. 

Maha Bodhisattva Shantideva said:

“Just as a flash of lightning momentarily brings a pitch dark and stormy night into view, due to the awakened ones’ force (Buddha Nature) meritorious wisdom can originate in this world on extremely rare occasions.”

During those momentary flashes, which are almost like disturbed sleep, some awareness that the unawakened ones experience is most of the time ignored and passed by, and therefore forgotten.

Sometimes, the excellence of these mini-awakenings is understood to a minimal degree, so that they either sail with immense fear and pressure to find a port, or cling on to any shore they find and blindly believe that there is a static quality both in sailing and in finding the promised land.

So they go in circles for ever more. 

Swimming swimming, 

walking walking, 

flying flying 

and then doing it all over repeatedly with this desperate chase-like hope and fear.

Life after life sailing indefinitely in all forms of vehicles. 

Some slower, some faster. 

All the while not knowing that their hopes and fears were just figments, which means all this boundless journey is just a dream.

It’s a kind of debt that they bring on to themselves, and it becomes impossible to forgive. 

That doing, that karma, further deepens their dreaming. 

Because of it, the awakened ones can’t wake them up just like that. Instead, they sail with them, consciously, all the way through.

As captains, as first mates, as sailors, as passengers. 

They learn with them, they unlearn with them, they succeed with them, they fail with them.

They live and die together, reborn consciously and unconsciously as teachers and students. 

As fathers and sons, as mothers and daughters, as close relations and distant relations, as strangers and acquaintances, as friends and enemies. 

Over and over again, as if the awakened ones were truly as lost as the unawakened ones, even if it means that the awakened ones have to journey seemingly for an eternity.

May supplemental tidings of such a kind wear out the dreariness of our hearts from journeying. 

From the dreariness of ‘to’ and ‘from’. 

From the dreariness of seeing ‘to’ and ‘from’ as separate. 

May we wake up to the inseparability of ‘to’ and ‘from’. 

May we wake up to the passing and the returning of the awakened ones as their benevolent display.

For all of Karmapa’s ‘Meditations for our times’ please see: https://www.karmapa.org/meditations-for-our-times/

Joe and Tashi Armstrong

Bill Burns writes:I don’t have a ship, but here’s a seaworthy song composed in the fall of ‘22 along with my musical friend John Schilling on guitar. Enjoy.