Lately I’ve been learning about Ven. Thích Thiện Chiếu (1898-1974), an exemplar of the Vietnamese #EngagedBuddhism tradition and an important revolutionary figure in Sài Gòn's colonial resistance. He published many commentaries that connected ideas of Buddhist liberation to national liberation. 1/

Okay—took me a few days to get myself to the bookstore, but I cannot tell you how excited I am to crack into Ocean Vuong’s latest novel!

#booksky #oceanvuong #emperorofgladness

Mahasthamaprapta Bodhisattva is a comrade—confirmed. ✊🏼

Honestly, I'm really moved by how pro-labor this #Buddhist scripture seems—like, it appears to argue/imply that the primary duty of both divine and stately power is improving the well-being of the working masses.

🙏🏼 Nam mô Đại thế chi Bồ tát 🙇🏻‍♂️

Remember Karen Russell promoting VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE twelve years ago, and how absolutely stunning the short story “Proving Up” was, and how she said she was working on a novel set in the Dust Bowl??

It’s FINALLY here! Cannot WAIT to start digging into this.

Went to Chinatown today and came across this statue that is unambiguously Angida the Snakecatcher (aka Clothsack Arhat), and not Maitreya (aka Clothsack Bodhisattva).

Super cool! You almost never see this—normally, you get conflations between the two, sometimes with the Vietnamese Earth God too.

Yeah, all of this 100%

The United States’s foreign policy has always been fascism abroad, to maintain global US hegemony, bullying every nation to submit or be starved/bombed to death, like Vietnam was, Afghanistan, etc. The media isn’t just complicit—it cheers it on, sanitizing ethnic cleaning into “peacekeeping.”

Ancient Buddhist love poetry kinda slaps.

SF’s Russian Hill Bookstore has a surprisingly extensive #buddhiststudies section. I picked up this Pure Land anthology edited by Richard Payne and Kenneth Tanaka, which I’ve somehow never gotten to, and this translation of Maitreya’s Mahayanasutralamkara(-bhasyam).

Another cool find at the #RareBooksSF fair—one of the original 1000 copies of Das Kapital, Vol I.

Cool find at #rarebookssf this morning. As relevant today as ever.

Dunno who might wanna know abt this, but there’s a Cdrama for Buddhist Studies geeks called Faithful to Buddha, Faithful to You—a young historian travels back in time, meeting 4th c. translator Kumarajiva early in his career. They fall in love & put the entire history of Buddhism in China at risk.

While the Chinese are teaching Americans about how their socialism actually works in practice on Rednote, absent the lies of liberal propaganda, the Americans are reminding the Chinese—who’ve lived under socialism for nearly 75 years—just how horrific, bloody and oppressive capitalism actually is.

Ever since they first encountered each other, Marxism and Buddhism formed a synergistic partnership aiming to dispel the misery of the masses—Marxism as the dialectical method to solve material suffering; Buddhism as the dialectical method to solve spiritual suffering. Together, a complete praxis.

Whale worship has a long documented history in parts of Viet Nam.

A possible source (or syncretic support?) for this is Madhyamagama 35 where the Buddha lists “huge fish-like creatures” many leagues in length I assume are whales along w/ turtles & crocodiles in a list of gods living in the ocean.

Some fun trivia that intersects Buddhist Studies with pop-culture...

The "Super Saiyan" trope from the anime DBZ of an advanced cultivator's black hair turning gold is actually an ancient Indian trope and appears in the episode of Megha and Dipamkara Buddha.

#buddhism #literarytropes