[Buddha-l] "Free and Easy" Vajra song

[Franz Metcalf]

Dan et al.,

I wrote my previous post today before getting the latest batch of  
posts in this thread. Your two recent posts go a long way to answering  
my question. No need to respond to it now.

While not so peeved by the doha as Dan is, I also am wary of it.  
There's nothing wrong with it in context, but it needs to be read in  
tension with the other half of the dharma: bodhisattva activity. We  
need to act in this world. We are not Jains here, right? As I see it,  
we somehow need to act as if it mattered, and react as if it didn't.  
Vague, I know, but there's a paradoxical middle way laid out for us by  
the tradition and we need to find it for ourselves. In the doha Gendun  
Rinpoche speaks generally, but we face the challenge in all the  
particulars of our lives.

This conversation arose from talk on love. I loved my father. He died  
in December and as his only son I'll be the last speaker at his  
memorial in ten days. What shall I say? Shall I be all Gendun Rinpoche- 
y and act as if all was fine? No, I'm not at that place. I'm closer to  
the poem from the Eleh Ezkerah that Robert posted, last week: "To  
remember this brings painful joy." My father was a psychiatrist and  
began his career as a Freudian (he later moved into object relations  
and attachment theory). Freud once said the meaning of life was  
"lieben und arbeiten," to love and work. Can we, as Buddhists, do  
those as well as Freud himself? As well as my dad, the atheist? If so,  
it doesn't matter who we quote.

Franz