Extra Credit

I attended the Tibetan Buddhist Group today at the Ekoji Buddhist Sangha. I mainly chose the Tibetan Buddisht Group because its the last one before Friday, but i'm glad that I went to that one and not the Zen Meditation because I couldn't handle sitting like that with my legs crossed for any longer then we did. I’m not used to sitting with my legs crossed so sitting like that for about an hour was pretty hard for me. I just couldn’t get comfortable and my feet kept falling asleep. But aside from that I thought all the other aspects of the group were really interesting and I would go back again if I could get over the sitting for that long. Everybody was nice about it though and the Lama told us at the beginning that it was ok if we had to move around if we needed to.
I got there about 7:15 and there were two other new people there too so I felt better because I definitely didn’t want to be the only new person there. So we took our shoes of and went up stairs and introduced ourselves to the Lama and sat down. Two other new people walked in soon along with some people who had been there before, all in all I would say it was 10 people in the group. Usually they start at 7:30 but I think since there were several new people the Lama asked us why we decided to attend class and what we already knew about Buddhism and things like that. He also started explain things like the four noble truths and talked about emptiness and he used an example about how Coke doesn’t contain the flavor inside it because if the goodness of coke was inside the bottle then everybody who drank it would have to like but they don’t because the flavor is subjective.
After that he described how we were supposed to sit with our legs crossed and each foot on the opposite thigh, back straight, hold your arms out and let them just fall naturally, and chin tucked a little bit. Then we started the prayer or mantra and he said we could try to follow along or just listen, then he hit this little gong and we began the prayer. Once the prayer was done he hit the little gong again and we started the silent meditation. Before he had told us that if anything pops into your head your supposed to take it as just a thought and think of it as a bubble that you pop with a feather and then go back to your relaxed mind. We did that for about 10 minutes and then he hit the gong again and we started the prayers again. The last prayer we said was the longevity prayers and he said usually you say that prayer in the morning.

The Blizzard

I picked the dream sequence "The Dream" from the Kurosawa film "Dreams". The scene starts off slow but overall I thought that the scene was pretty interesting. This dream sequence is about four mountain climbers that get caught in a blizzard after leaving there camp. After getting caught in the blizzard three of the guys agree they that they need to stop until the storm dies down but the leader of the group wants them to keep going. While arguing it seems like the three guys who wanted to stop just start to faint one by one. The leader shakes them to wake them up but they don't. Eventually he starts to go down to put right before he passes out a woman appears and puts a blanket over him. They never say the woman's name but I think they are implying that she is Izanami.
Izanami and Izanagi are the creators of the land that became known as Japan. So it is possible that she came down to help him out but it is also possible that it could have been the Kami of the mountain that showed up to save then from the storm. She gave the leader a blanket and told him the "The snow is warm", and "The ice is hot". I'm not really sure what she meant but after that the storm cleared and he was able to get up. Then he was able to wake up his friends and and their camp appeared in the background and they were saved. The Kami is the only way i can think of tho relate this particular scene to Shinto.