{"id":523,"date":"2009-04-02T00:03:55","date_gmt":"2009-04-02T00:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2009\/04\/week-1-hardcore-dharma-is-a-go.html"},"modified":"2009-04-02T00:03:55","modified_gmt":"2009-04-02T00:03:55","slug":"week-1-hardcore-dharma-is-a-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/04\/week-1-hardcore-dharma-is-a-go.html","title":{"rendered":"Week 1: Hardcore Dharma is a Go"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The Buddha didn’t care about malas or incense – he was interested in how the mind works.”
\n-Ethan\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For the next nine weeks, Wednesday night at the Interdependence Project will be a teeming morass of Buddhist teaching and inquiry called Hardcore Dharma<\/a>. I was at the opening class last night of the new Hardcore Dharma group (not to be confused with the fancy-pants Intermediate group that meets on Saturday) and it was great, like my first class in college but with a sense of actual, like, purpose<\/em>. Rain and cold and general New York crumminess didn’t keep people away – truly, we are hardcore.\u00a0
\nEthan<\/a> introduced the class (“Much like the Marines, I expect half of you to fail<\/em>“), reviewed the syllabus (“80-plus hours of reading and 140 of meditation per week, minimum”),\u00a0and got straight to teaching. We covered a lot of material, starting with a discussion of the Three Prajnas<\/a>, an introduction to the Four Noble Truths<\/a>, and digressions about Sanskrit vs. Pali translations and methane emissions from the Siberian tundra.
\nI’ll be blogging dispatches from Hardcore Dharma,\u00a0
\naddressing a topic from each week’s teaching that tweaked my interest. For this inaugural post, however, just a general impression:
\nIt’s good to be with a group of people again. When I took the refuge vow<\/a> last autumn, I committed to studying the Dharma, following the example of the Buddha, and being part of my sangha, or community. I’ve meditated every week and read Dharma books, but I always seem to neglect the sangha. As Ethan pointed out, Buddhism was an oral tradition for 250 years after the death of the Buddha and the sutras, often structured through lists and classification, were meant to be memorized and retold.\u00a0
\nThe sutras are written now and\u00a0available\u00a0to anyone with a library card or the inclination to visit Amazon.com, but the social experience of gathering to\u00a0receive\u00a0teachings, debate and discuss, and tell jokes afterwards is central to deepening one’s practice. The image of the lonely scholar may be romantic, but unless I have people – actual live human beings – with whom to talk and ask questions and simply be, I tend to fall off the wagon.\u00a0
\nIn a sense, we are a small pocket of anti-Twitter: face-to-face, substantive, and not dependent on iPhones for snazzy presentation.
\nIf you missed out on this Hardcore Dharma series and would like to deepen your meditation practice while getting a scholarly overview of the Buddhist tradition, you have two options:
\n1. Wait patiently for the next series to start, OR
\n2. Sign up for Home Listen<\/a> and get all the benefits of the course without having to show up and deal with my annoying quips!
\nAND if you sign up for Home Listen TODAY, Joseph Biden, the Vice President of \u00a0the United States, will come to your residence and cook a roast while regaling you with tales of his\u00a0hard-scrabble\u00a0upbringing in Scranton, Pennsylvania. \u00a0
\nHardcore Dharma is a go.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The Buddha didn’t care about malas or incense – he was interested in how the mind works.” -Ethan\u00a0 For the next nine weeks, Wednesday night at the Interdependence Project will be a teeming morass of Buddhist teaching and inquiry called Hardcore Dharma. I was at the opening class last night of the new Hardcore Dharma…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":184,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-and-media"],"yoast_head":"\nWeek 1: Hardcore Dharma is a Go - One City<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/04\/week-1-hardcore-dharma-is-a-go.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Week 1: Hardcore Dharma is a Go - One City\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"“The Buddha didn’t care about malas or incense – he was interested in how the mind works.” -Ethan\u00a0 For the next nine weeks, Wednesday night at the Interdependence Project will be a teeming morass of Buddhist teaching and inquiry called Hardcore Dharma. 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