[Buddha-l] Eckhart Tolle

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 07:27 -0500, Vaj wrote:

> There are big egos everywhere Richard, not just here. Seems to be an
> occupational hazard for some scholars.

A big ego is not an occupational hazard for scholars. It's a congenital
disease that every human being is born with.

> Go to some neo-satsangs. 

No, thanks. I have a deep allergy to group activities. I'm inclined to
agree with Kierkegaard that "The crowd is untruth." ("Crowd" was
Kierkegaard's translation of "sangha".)

> Do your field research. 

I don't do field research. I'm a textualist.

> Then share. I'd love to hear your impressions.

I have given you my impressions. I watched two videos of Eckhart Tolle
and liked what I saw. I like the way he talks, for reasons I have
already shared with you.

Incidentally, Tolle came to my attention through three independent
sources, almost at the same time. One source was a friend, a devout
Catholic family counsellor, who gave my wife a copy of <cite>The Power
of Now</cite> with the comment "This looks like the sort of book you
might like. I just couldn't get into it at all." 

Within a few hours of that, my wife and I visited Father Thomas Hand, a
Jesuit who trained for some thirty years in Zen in Japan and taught Zen
meditation to people at a Sisters of Mercy convent in California. Fr.
Hand was telling us about a workshop he was doing on the work of Eckhart
Tolle.

Not long after that, we got an e-mail from someone who has dedicated the
past thirty-some years to the Vedanta Society in southern California,
where she has attended talks by countless swamis in that tradition. She
also spoke with enthusiasm about Tolle.

Now I am by temperament a contrarian. If anyone suggests to me to read a
book or see a movie, I immediately make a vow not to read that book or
see that movie. (Jung tells us this is standard behavior for us
introverts. We can't stand to be told what to do, how to think or what
to wear.) Nevertheless, my wife rented a couple of Eckart Tolle videos.
I watched. I liked them. I decided to show one of them in my Zen
Buddhism course this semester, since the last part of the course will be
dedicated to people who adapted Zen to completely secular frameworks or
to non-Buddhist systems of religion.

> Have you had any first hand experience with non-dual teachings in
> Buddhism or Vedanta?

Does getting hit on the back by a Korean Zen master count as a first-
hand experience? Yeah, I did that for about six years and listened to
countless dharma talks on non-dualism and wrestled with a hwadu for a
while. It was enough to convince me that non-dualism doesn't speak to my
condition at all. My post-Zen Buddhist practice has been devoted almost
entirely to the four foundations of mindfulness and metta-bhavana.

Actually, if you're interested in hearing my criticisms of non-dualism,
there are some passages in my book <cite>Land of Non Buddha</cite>. I'll
probably be posting some of those passages on my web site fairly soon.
Frankly, I see no reason why you should read them. You seem happy with
non-dualism and would gain nothing at all from hearing it criticized by
someone who has no use for it.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico