I’m happy to tell people that we did find a space and moved into it at the end of July. We’ve been there for an entire month now. It is at 6050 Lowell Street in northern Oakland, which is the tri-border area where Oakland, Emeryville, and Berkeley come together. We’re a 20 minute walk from the Ashby station in Berkeley or a quick bike ride. I don’t have any great photos of the space except some I took of the space when were were examining the building.

We have 800 sq ft in two concrete floored rooms downstairs and 800 sq ft in one larger room upstairs (pictured below) giving us a fairly large overall space. The build out of the space has taken a little longer than we initially expected but we’re making progress. Right now, we have a conference table, a couch, and about 10 desks upstairs along with a packet radio station, a broken makerbot, and an unassembled makerbot. The downstairs is full of tools from building our desks (which is an interesting project in and of itself). Soon, we’ll have at least one more couch and conference table upstairs as well. It took us a few weeks of fighting to get high speed Internet but it is finally working (Comcast sucks, by the way) so people can actually get work done while in the space. Dr. Jesus, one of our board members, also built an electronic entry system for our door, giving us 24 hour access to the space. Another member, Dennis, who is an architect, has been working on designs in Google Sketchup for the space but we’re kind of jury rigging things as we go right now.

AMT has somewhere between 16 and 20 active members and seem to be picking up a few a week right now. We continue to meet every Monday night at 7:30 PM for a general meeting, demonstrations, and workshops. Our first quarterly meeting is in two weeks where we will induct new members officially into the organization. You can join our e-mail list if you’re interested in the group or go to the wiki for more information.

My next personal projects at AMT are:

• Finally building my makerbot
• Building my Zen Toolworks CNC mill (from a kit)
• Beginning to work on my DIY Drone using a megaduino and some off the shelf electronics inspired by DIY Drones and a Defcon 18 talk that showed how easy it really is (by some definitions of “easy”)
• Building a trike with Mike G. (who is building a tandem trike) using plans from Atomic Zombie (This will involve a bit of welding so we’ve been delayed by ventilation needs)

Other people are working on far more interesting projects as we get tools into the space.

I encourage anyone local to the Bay Area, especially the East Bay, or coming through to contact us and stop by.

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This last weekend, I was in Las Vegas for the second time in a month. I had been there a month ago for the Black Hat and Defcon computer security conventions. Generally, I only go to Vegas when my work sends me since I don’t really drink, gamble, or womanize. This time, I came back for a Zen retreat.

When I told people that I was going to Las Vegas for a Zen retreat, everyone seemed utterly shocked. They would ask me, “There’s Zen in Vegas?” I’d tell them that of course there was. Zen can be found in most major cities but the cognitive dissonance seemed to be pretty big for a lot of people. I shouldn’t have been too surprised because I had only been vaguely aware that there were Zen practitioners there before quite recently.

I was invited to attend by one of my teachers, Rev. Paul Dōch’ŏng Lynch, JDPSN. He is the head teacher of the Five Mountain Sangha in which I was ordained last year. This retreat was the first multiple day one held at the Zen Center of Las Vegas’ brand new temple. They have been around since the early 1990′s but had recently acquired two adjacent houses and refurbished one into being their new center. They did a wonderful job as well as you can see below and on my flickr photo set:

The Dharma Room

The View Across the Property

The retreat was a Yong Maeng Jong Jin (in Korean) or “to leap like a tiger while sitting” retreat. These are generally three or seven day intensive retreats, similar to the Japanese Zen sesshins. The Zen Center of Las Vegas (hereafter “ZCLV”) is a member of the Kwan Um School of Zen, the largest Zen organization in the West, which practices a form of Sŏn, or Korean Zen Buddhism. The school was founded by Zen Master Sŭngsan and it is where Rev. Lynch originally trained before Sŭngsan’s death in 2004. Rev Thomas Kwanjok Pastor, JDPSN is the guiding teacher at the ZCLV and one is also one of Rev. Lynch’s closest friends. Because of this close relationship and history, we were invited to participate in this inaugural retreat at the new temple by Rev. Pastor.

I found the retreat to be very interesting. In a sense, that’s not actually true. The practice of the retreat itself, the sitting and walking meditation, the morning and evening ceremonies, and the interviews for koan work, were all not terribly unusual. We used the forms of the Kwan Um School but since we are, ultimately, derived from that school and its founder, they were almost the same as what we practice within the Five Mountain Sangha. What was interesting to me was to see how our Dharma cousins at the ZCLV practiced, interacted, and otherwise went about their normal practices. They did things slightly differently, emphasizing different aspects of practices, and had a little bit of a different outlook than what I’ve sen at our own Five Mountain Sangha retreats. It was close enough to not be terribly alien but just different enough that it stood out from time to time. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to help officiate at a precepts ceremony for a Five Mountain Sangha member, Glenda, who is also an occasional student of mine. The ZCLV was kind enough to allow us to hold our ceremony separately from their own during the retreat, which also allowed me to see how they did the same ceremony. Again, same but different.

I also had an excellent opportunity to interview with Rev. Pastor and engage in koan work with him. I am very grateful for that. I also found the sangha members of the ZCLV to be overwhelmingly friendly, engaging, and welcoming to us. It would have been easy for them to not know what to make of the four of us who participated in their retreat but they didn’t treat us as anything other than fellow members of the Buddhist sangha. They even invited us to come back, reminding those of us from California that they are only a short flight or drive away. I know that I feel like I definitely have a welcome place to go when I find myself in Las Vegas. It is nice to know that the Dharma can be found in a city that I’ve often thought of us exemplifying everything that is wrong with American culture and society. It turns out that I was wrong and places like the ZCLV are beacons of sanity in a desert there.

Update: Rev. Lynch has put his pictures of the precepts ceremony up as well here. He has also written his own blog post about the retreat.

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There have been ongoing rumbles about this scandal going round the blogosphere and tweetverse since this time. In mid-June, the board of the Zen Studies Society met and decided to produce ethical guidelines for their organization that included both sexual conduct and also a somewhat weak acknowledgment of past improprieties by Shimano Roshi. People were somewhat mollified but I know quite a few felt like it was still kind of sweeping it under the zabuton (or is “sweeping under the tatami” a better metaphor?). I’d heard that things had heated up after this but had not been paying much attention to it during the last two months because, really, what do I have to say about the conduct of a Zen master that I don’t know in an organization that I have no connection with when so many others have said so much?

Well, the issue has hit the mainstream press now. There was a New York Times piece on it this last Friday, August 20. It turns out that part of why the issue heated up again is that it turned out that (surprise!) the misconduct was not all well in the past but still ongoing. From the piece:

"In interviews over the past two weeks, four board members, including Mr. Marinello, said that on June 21 a woman — whose name he would not reveal — stood up during dinner at the Catskills monastery and announced that for the past two years she had had a consensual affair with Mr. Shimano, who was at the dinner. Several board members have said that Mr. Shimano later admitted the affair in conversations with them. On Wednesday, the society issued a statement acknowledging that ‘in June of this year, a woman revealed that there was an inappropriate relationship between herself and Eido Roshi.’"

To quote Homer Simpson, "Doh!"

You know, if I was the focus of ongoing discussion about my role as a teacher and my sexual behavior, discussion going on not just for years, but for decades, I might try to find a way to avoid even the appearance of impropriety that comes with even a consensual sexual relationship with one of my students. I understand that things can be quite complex between adults, believe me, but good sense and knowledge of one’s role to others (not to mention power dynamics between teachers and students) just makes this kind of thing a bad idea even if one is not already underneath a cloud and being gossiped about by others. The fact that we are now reading this in the New York Times does actually damage the standing of the Dharma in the eyes of the public, doing it a great disservice. The solution, of course, is not to hush things up (as some might do) but to not engage in this behavior as a teacher!

I do not know Shimano Roshi. I have no real desire to know him. I also have no real ability to judge him as a human being, not knowing him, his situation, or his relationships. I do have a responsibility as a Zen priest to the Dharma though. I have enough problems keeping my own conduct in adherence with the Dharma and my precepts for both my own benefit as well as that of others, without seeing people engaging in out and out egregious behavior. That is what prompts me to say, in no unclear terms, that Shimano Roshi’s behavior, at least when it comes to his relationships with women, is in no way acceptable or within the bounds of the behavior of a Zen teacher (nor probably anyone else, come to think of it, given his position of authority). The fact that tens or hundreds of thousands of people who know little about the Dharma or Zen are now reading about it in the newspaper just makes the damage all the more severe. This is going to be a longterm scandal, just like that of Baker Roshi and the San Francisco Zen Center, that we will hear about for decades to come. Given our inability to police our own teachers and community, it is probably well deserved in a way.

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Robert Aitken Roshi died last night. He was 93 years old. This is a sad moment for American Zen.

Here is the official notice from his blog.

James Ford wrote a wonderful post on Aitken Roshi reflecting on his history and impact.

Aitken Roshi, through his books and example, has had a profound effect on my perception of Zen and my desire to practice this path. He has been one of the stalwart examples of an ethical teacher that, as far a I can tell, lived up to the principles of our faith. His writings were and are incredibly inspirational to me.

I believe he will be remembered as one of our most important Western teachers of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Jack Daw posted the following quote from Aitken Roshi’s book, “Miniatures of a Zen Master”:

"Old age ain’t no place for sissies. Yes, that’s true. One must cope with a range of afflictions from incontinence to macular degeneration, not to mention peripheral neuropathy, strokes and cancer – and memory loss! Yet I don’t mourn my loss youth. What a confused mess I was! What time I wasted! All in all, I am really quite comfortable in these last years. Pass the marmalade."

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I’ve received word back that I am now approved to visit and on the visitor’s list for San Quention. SQ is the big (and fairly famous) prison in the Bay Area of California. What many people don’t know is that it is also a facility with an incredible amount of volunteers and volunteer work. There are all kinds of groups and individuals meeting with inmates to try to help their lives or give them opportunities.

There has been a Zen sangha there for ten years or so. Most of the volunteers for it are affiliated with the San Francisco Zen Center or East Bay Community of Mindful Living. It meets every week on Sunday evening and has a fairly regular population of inmates during its existence, though people do tend to come and go as inmates get transferred around, released, or simply move on.

A number of years back, I spent about a year and a half volunteering at McNeil Island in Washington State (the only surviving prison on an island, as far as I know). This was in a Neopagan context, working with a friend who had been running a group out of the chapel there for a few years. My own practice was transitioning to Buddhism at this point but he needed help, effectively running a one man shop on his own. I began helping him and quickly wound up running things as he was forced to go to Iraq for our lovely war there. Eventually, I simply couldn’t maintain the level of commitment involved, especially with the prison being hours and a ferry ride away, but I have been wanting to go back to working with inmates. The group at San Quentin, with its large volunteer pool, is a good opportunity to get back into this sort of thing. It’s only a 25 minute or so drive away on the other side of the Bay.

As I’ve mentioned to people before, prison really strips things to their essentials for a lot (if not all) people. The inmates have so little control over their lives and, really, so little to actually do that they wind up having a lot of things that we all tend to ignore in our lives made unavoidable. They have nothing but time to think and, if so inclined, they have ample opportunity something as straightforward as a meditation and study practice. Given the barrenness of life in prison, as well as the stresses, anything that can be done to support inmates in practice should be done, in my opinion.

This is leaving aside the unfortunately large part of the population that thinks inmates should be locked away for life, treated like animals, and forgotten by society while they are being punished. That doesn’t really play well with Buddhist ethics though. These people made mistakes, often many of them, and are, justly or not, paying a price for them. Cause and effect is karma in its essential form. That being true, they are still not any different than you or me and you have to ask yourself, when working with inmates, how easily it could be you on the inside there. I’ve certainly wondered at times. It is important to treat them as people and give them opportunities. If they don’t choose to avail themselves to them, that’s one thing, but it is one of the best ways to help them turn their lives around when they want to do so. We have one of the largest prison populations in the world and these are men and women that are shit upon by society, even once it is all over. The Dharma is for everyone, not just for supposedly perfect people. Everyone!

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I’ve owned the onesangha.org domain for a while. In 2008, I made an attempt to get a group Buddhist blog going there drawing on people from a number of different traditions. For a variety of reasons, that blog never had more than a couple of posts, mostly because the other authors were just a bit too busy.

I’ve spoken about E-sangha here before and all of the problems that Buddhist forum had during the last few years (almost entirely problems of their own creation). As it turns out, E-sangha died a final death sometime in this last year. While the Zen guys have created the Zen Forum International, there hasn’t been any large scale replacement for a non-sectarian Buddhist web forum. All current efforts are organized around specific groups, traditions, or commercial enterprises. For example, the Karma Kagyu have a very active group on ning.com but it is limited to their own people. Tricycle magazine has an active site as well but it is a vehicle to support the magazine, its content, and community.

In the last few years, social networking has continued to move to the forefront of the daily activity of people, bringing more people into active participation online. Because of this, I think that this is actually a great time to have some sort of social networking site as well as something that can replace the aforementioned E-sangha. To this end, I’ve repurposed the onesanghga.org domain to create the, simply named, OneSangha community site.

The site is built using Buddypress, an add-on to WordPress that allows one to integrate social networking into a wordpress-based site. Additionally, Buddypress supports BBpress, a web forum software made by the same people. I’ve used WordPress for my blogs for years, which makes it pretty easy for me. We’re also using it (and probably Buddypress) on the Mozilla Quality site that I work on for work.

Buddypress is based around the concept of “groups” within it. People create their personal accounts and then join or create groups on the site. These groups act as a gathering place for activity, host personal updates and forums. There is also the possibility of adding a group blog to each of the groups through plugins. This means that each interest group, tradition of Buddhist practice, or organization can create its own group, such as “Kwan Um School” group or a “Avatamsaka Sutra” group.

The site also allows users to tie into twitter (which I use quite heavily), pulling their tweets into OneSangha and being able to post from OneSangha into twitter under their accounts as well. I’ve added RSS feeds for groups and posts, which will also make it much easier to read content when not on the site, which has been difficult with other forums in the past.

Right now, the site is very much in an alpha stage. There are all of six or seven users and two groups in existence on it. I’m encouraging people to make accounts, log in, create groups, and play around with the site. I’m also continuing to add useful plugins to enhance the existing functionality.

I’ll probably need to add some sort of text advertisements or something similar on the pages simply to pay for the hosting fees but I’m hoping to keep such things pretty low-key and as unobtrusive as possible.

Please come check it out if you are looking for a Buddhist social networking site and web forum. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t like (leaving aside Buddhist teachings about preferences for the moment). If you are interested in helping out in some fashion, please let me know as well. The theming, look and feel, etc. are all pretty basic at this point.

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While I was in Seattle visiting friends and family the other week, I had a chance to visit Metrix Create:Space and Jigsaw Renaissance. These are two of the public hackerspaces in the Seattle area. Metrix is run along more business and less club lines. People can show up and work on things, rent tools or time on the makerbots or the laster cutter, and generally sit around developing projects. Jigsaw Renaissance is a hackerspace on more common lines, as a sort of member-based social club. In that model, which we were also using for Ace Monster Toys, people pay for membership in the space and can use it as they wish. When more expensive items need to be purchased, the group raises funds internally in order to facilitate things. This kind of space also builds a bit more of a community, in my experience, as it isn’t being run as any one individual’s personal profit making business.

That being said, both spaces look to be interesting places to check out. I definitely felt more at home with what Jigsaw Renaissance wants to do. You can find both spaces near Capitol Hill.

I put up photos from Metrix Create:Space and Jigsaw Renaissance up on Flickr in order to help people get a sense of the spaces.

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I do own a Kindle DX, on which I have been reading ebooks for the last year. It has gotten to the point that for any popular novels that I want to read, I’ll always check to see if the publisher makes an ebook version of it. If they don’t, I stop and ask myself if I really want to read it. If it is one of the authors that I always read, I bite the bullet and get a paper book but that is really a less valuable option for me at this point.

One problem that I’ve had is that while this works for fiction, this does not work so well for Buddhist books. Almost all interesting new Buddhist books, as well as older titles, are only available in paper. Only Snow Lion has made a lot of their books available as ebooks. They’ve only done that on the Kindle in the proprietary topaz format (not even the normal mobi format that most Kindle books use). As far as I know, they aren’t doing anything in the ePub format which is actually a decent standard at this point. Because of this, I have actively avoided purchasing Snow Lion’s ebooks.

For myself, I prefer open formats or at least ones not tied to one device. For fiction, I actually prefer going to places like Webscriptions.net to purchase mobi or ePub format books because I can get them without DRM. This means when the Kindle dies or is superceded, I will be able to take those same books to another device as long as it can read mobi or ePub formatted books. If I can’t get those two formats, I’ll often go for PDF, which are not resolution independent (they all assume a certain size of book) but are fairly well supported on any platform. I can read PDF books on anything. It is important to think about the longer term, not just the next year or two, when we talk about the conversion from analog to digital media.

Shambhala Publications announced today that they are going to make a certain selection of their books available, focusing on big authors for them like Chögyam Trunga and Pema Chodron. Then they are going to offer their back catalog. In conversation on twitter, I was told that they would support multiple formats and that DRM wouldn’t be an issue. The announcement on Publishers Lunch states:

Shambhala Publications will work with Open Road as their exclusive digital marketing partner. Open Road’s digital entertainment evp Luke Parker Bowles will produce marketing videos about Shambhala’s authors, books, “and the worlds and ideas that they explore,” focusing initially on four authors–Pema Chodron, Natalie Goldberg, David Richo, and Chögyam Trungpa–as their titles release in ebook versions.

Shambhala expects to have the bulk of its backlist converted to and available as ebooks by the end of the year, and will publish its frontlist simultaneously in print and ebook form starting in September.

“Open Road” here is “Open Road Integrated Media,” from what I can tell. They have a rather bare site up at http://openroadmedia.com but there was a New York Times article on them last October.

I’m hoping that this is the beginning of a shift in the Buddhist publishing world that will herald the availability of Buddhist texts, both old and current, as electronic books. For example, I would love to have a good readable translation of the Pali Canon, such as the one that Wisdom Publications has done (see here for one volume of this). That would make study so much easier given the size of many of these books or Mahayana sutras like the Avatamsaka Sutra, which is over 1,300 pages long in translation.

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I’ve always appreciated, if not always dramatically celebrated, the wheel of the year as a sensible series of holidays (or “holy days”) during the year. Of these, I’ve always appreciated the solstices the most. They are the points of the greatest light and darkness in our daily experience of the world. Today, the Summer solstice occurred at 4:38 AM today in my local time (and I think that I was even awake for it!). Today we enter Summer. The days will continue to get hotter, especially here in California, but they will begin to shorten again.

Since I’m not involved with any of the pagan groups in California, having pretty much switched entirely to focusing on Buddhist practice in the year before I moved down here, I’m not celebrating today’s solstice with anyone. I’ll engage in my normal meditative practices today.

Instead, this weekend, I will be visiting family and friends in Seattle with my wife. While there, we’re going to go to the Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America, the only North American Shinto shrine. This will be to attend Nagoshi-no-Oharahi Taisai (夏越の祓), the great midyear purification. (Shinto is rather big on purification…) It isn’t quite a solar celebration as much as a midyear one since it is performed on the last day of the sixth month of the lunar calendar, being one of the two great purifications done a year (the other being at the end of the twelfth lunar month). This rite is a form of purification involving walking through a circle of rope. A large sacred ring called a chi-no-wa, made of loosely twisted miscanthus reeds, is set up and after oharahi people walk through it. It was originally intended for the purification of agricultural workers, to ward off mishap.

The shrine describes the event with the following:

This is one of the most enjoyable and interesting ceremonies and important days of Great Purification during the yearly cycle…during this ceremony the Oharahi-no-Kotoba (the most important words of Shinto) is read facing the sanpaisa instead of Shinzen and participants receive the Kirinusa Oharae (Oharahi Shinji)….this Taisai employs the sacred instruments of Katashiro (paper effigy/hitogata) and Chi-no-Wa (reed hoop) to purify any unfortunate Ki from first hald of the year and then to receive fresh Ki/ power of Nature to successfully pass through the second hald of the year…after the Chi-no-Wa Shinji participants can see the purified Katashiro go into the Mountain River (Katashiro Shinji).

We joined the shrine a bit over a year ago when visiting Seattle but this will be the first event that we’ve attended since that time. I’m very much looking forward to it.

The seeming oddness of a (nominally Korean) Zen priest who grew up Roman Catholic and was a Neopagan participating in Shinto purification rituals is not entirely lost on me but, as a friend of mine once said to sum up certain aspects of the global world we find ourselves within, “Aloha, Amigo!”

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The effort to get Ace Monster Toys, the East Bay Hackerspace, off the ground continues.

We continue to meet on Monday nights at 7:30 PM, often at Berkeley Coworking. This last Monday we took another step towards becoming official by electing our board of directors. This consists of:

• Al Billings (that is, me)
• Christian Fernandez
• Shannon Lee
• Mike Gittelsohn
• Dr. Jesus (a man of questionable virtue)

Our next task is to appoint our three officers, the president, the secretary, and the treasurer. Neha volunteered to be secretary on the spot (a thankless task!). We have candidates for the others though it is also possible that one of us may resign from the board to become president because, in a fit of civic theory, we made board member ineligible to be officers and then elected most of the membership willing to be in charge of things to the board. (Oops!)

The reason why we need officers immediately to go with the board is that I will be filing California non-profit incorporation papers for us. These papers require us to name our board and officers, along with our by-laws. The incorporation process is quick, taking only a week or two, and will allow us to rent a space and receive donations from people. Once that is returned, we will be filing for 501(c)(3) status with the federal government.

In the meantime, we are constantly looking at various potential spaces in the East Bay. You can follow our progress on the wiki if so inclined. We have several good candidates in Oakland and Berkeley.

Now that we have a board, I expect that our weekly Monday meetings will transition to something a bit more fun and a bit less organizational. We’ve spoken about having a visit and maybe class by the local chapter of Toool, the Open Organisation Of Lockpickers, as well as doing some electronic project instructions. I encourage anyone interested and in the East Bay to come out to one of the Monday meetings.

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