Saturday Morning Dharma Mouth-Punch

This is going to be a new ongoing weekly feature of my blog – The Saturday Dharma Mouth-Punch!

The concept is simple: I will review a blog -from the past week that either gave me a good Dharma punch in the face (good) or deserves a good kick in Hotei’s sack (bad). Get it? It works both ways. I can either give it or receive it. I’m like a sour patch kid…I start off sour but I can be sweet in the end.

For my first run at this – I am bringing back an old favorite – Mujaku from the The Zennist. Mujaku delivered a sweet Dharma Mouth-Punch with his post on Stuart Lach’s article The Zen Master in America: Dressing the Donkey with Bells and Scarves. Stuart does an amazing job of outlining, in a respectful manner, some of the more dramatic American Zen scandals as well as successfully dismantling the “Roshi Ideal” so prevalent in the West. Any practitioner of Buddhism (not just Zen) needs to read this before following any teacher, guru, roshi or rishi.

The truly amazing part about the article is that Lach actually is able to steer away from sensationalizing these scandals and succeeds in making you feel for the Roshi’s own human failings (for the most part, at least). Equally amazing is that Mujaku was able to devote an entire post to someone else’s opinion without bashing Western Buddhism in the process. My lip is still bleeding – The Dharma it has a killer left.

However, Mujaku is also receiving a good kick in Hotei’s sack for stealing a post that I have been toying with for three months. I have been playing around with a Zen scandal post – tweaking here and editing there – and was hoping to post it soon and Mujaku just *zip* pulls the rug from under me.

Fie on you Mujaku and your beautiful post! Now go get some ice on that sack!

Cheers,