Followers of our recent series on early Zen masters (and there were many, especially in the Far East), may be interested in this new session of short biographies on masters of Advaita Vedanta in southern India. Advaita has many similarities with Zen.

The series starts with Shankara, an early master who attempted a fusion of Buddhism with the spirituality of the Upanishads. He succeeded and created Advaita Vedanta, which is a powerful movement to this day, especially in southern India.

The session closes with 20th-century master, Ramana Maharshi, a much-loved saint — in its genuine sense — who spent his life on the famed Arunachala Hill at Tiruvannamalai. Not to be missed.

Start reading here.

Many apologies for yesterday’s long downtime on our main server. The hard drive chose a Sunday to give up the ghost, so it was replaced and tweaked back into life.

It had been playing up for a few weeks, so — digits crossed — it will be fit for purpose in future.

Where does the Zen come in?

A Life of Rinzai by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

For anyone following our Zen Masters’ series over on Spiritual Nirvana, the sixth and final biography is now underway :

The life of Rinzai (Lin Chi) is an interesting one. Not only did he found the famous Rinzai Zen school in Japan, but he also had a hilarious, and violent, relationship with his teacher Huang Po, who was the subject of our previous biography.

To read the life of Rinzai click here.

A Life of Huang Po by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

If you are following our Zen Masters series over on Spiritual Nirvana, you may like to know that the Life of our 5th Zen master, Huang Po, is now getting underway.

Huang Po was interesting in a number of respects. He coined the concept of “original mind”. He was also the master of Lin Chi, or Rinzai, after whom one of the major Japanese schools of Zen is named.

Method is the central principle in Zen. Moreover, no Zen master placed so great an emphasis on the method of awakening — as opposed to the practice of doctrinal forms — as did Huang Po.

You can find links to the four previous biographies in the Archive section in the sidebar.

Start reading the life of Huang Po.

A Life of Bodhidharma by John M Evans. The Zen Masters Series.

For all those readers following the Zen Masters series over on our webtitle, Spiritual Nirvana, we’re now starting the third : A Life of Bodhidharma.

Following on from the lives of Bankei and Dogen, we now go right back to the first days of Zen — then known as Ch’an in China after the tea plant which monks used to keep themselves awake during meditation. Bodhidharma is reputed to be the founder of this now venerable school of Buddhism, which down to this day has an elaborate tea ceremony.

It is said he arrived in China from South India around the time of King Arthur in the West. From his practice of sitting for hours staring at a wall, the whole Zen movement takes its cue.

Read : A Life of Bodhidharma — Part One.

A Review of Mediated: How the Media Shape Your World by Thomas de Zengotita.

This is a scintillating, exhilarating ride of a book. If you’re interested in blogging, or any aspect of the media, new or mainstream, you shouldn’t miss it. The author is an academic in New York with a PhD in anthropology. He began his career as a Method actor.

In the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas — which was not included in the New Testament by the politicians of the Roman Empire for being too mystical — Jesus says, “Become a disciple of your own mind”. That was probably the last time anything so Buddhist appeared in official Christian literature.

Although Zengotita doesn’t use it, the saying applies very well to his book, providing the subtext beneath (as Shakespeare might have put it), “All the world’s a stage, and we are merely players”.

Zengotita begins in November 1963, when he was a student Method actor in New York. One day, a teacher entered the room and said, “President Kennedy’s been shot.” Then left.

The students took it for an exercise and started rolling their eyes, lifting their arms to heaven, keening and wailing and, presumably gnashing their teeth. As actors do. Thirty minutes later the teacher entered again. “The President just died.”

There was a stunned silence as the students realized it was really true. Then they started writhing on the floor and weeping and groaning all over again.

Zengotita draws the conclusion that this was new to our culture : extreme emotional reactions to the death of someone we didn’t know and had never met — except in the media.

He believes we have now reached the stage where we are totally immersed in media images which “mediate” all our reactions, feelings and belief systems. Instead of confronting reality directly, as Thomas’s Jesus urges us to do, we are just corks bobbing about on the choppy waters of mass media, which permeates us and drowns out our own perceptions.

This mediation has become all but total and has massive implications for the way we live. Marshall Mcluhan’s “The Medium is the Message” was only the half of it. How else would we tolerate the suffocating injunctions of “political correctness” were it not for the almost total power of the media to project it into the mass mind, and therefore our own.

Psychological contagions are every bit as destructive as pathogenic epidemics. In the 1930s, Fascism spread like wildfire around the world, leading to yet another world war. It was the counter-culture to another psychic contagion, Marxism, which all but became a religion : the Radiant Way. We had been warned.

Norman Mailer puts it well, “As Mcluhan presented us with the realization that modernism was coming to an end, so Zengotita has a great deal to say about the saturation of post-modernism in our existence today.”

The death of Princess Diana, with its worldwide Mexican wave of shock, was a typical example of this phenomenon in action. So was the very recent hubbub over the grisly end of the croc-baiter, Steve Irwin. These are not rational reactions. They show us as mediated characters, receiving our grief second-hand.

The world and life as a performance has become the norm. We are now used to seeing everything through the lenses of others. We’ve become part of a World Mind, instead of using our own. In the face of this, what can be done?

We can become a disciple of our own mind. Zengotita’s wonderful book makes a solid contribution to our belated understanding of this eerie phenomenon.