Sitagu Buddha Vihara, Austin, Texas: Dhamma. 🪷 Behind every great story there’s a chainsaw-wielding Buddhist monk.
Which is to say, what I actually mean is each reporting process is populated by vibrant hidden figures like American Theravada Buddhist monkBhante Nalaka (born Steven Waite).
He walked me and my family around Sitagu Buddha Vihara in Southwest Austin.
I was at the Burmese Theravada Buddhist monastery hunting for a painting by exiled Burmese artist and activist Sitt Nyein Aye, but more on him in a moment.
American Ven. Nalaka received us at the end of a meditation retreat, his voice starting as a whisper and rising throughout our chat.
Born in Massachusetts, he grew up an “Army brat” and has flowed in and out of monastic life since 1981. Ven. Nalaka has spent about three years as a caretaker of the monastery’s 16-acre property, which is crowned by a golden pagoda, the largest in the United States.
The Buddhist complex has 40 buildings in all, including a treehouse. Ven. Nalaka is eager to discuss his humble inheritance: endless maintenance issues.
“My first year was scraping all these walls” to remove bubbling paint from leaks and humidity damage, he said. In 2023, he chainsawed 13 acres of felled tree limbs after an ice storm. “I had burn piles going everywhere,” he claimed.
Last year, the monks repainted the pagoda’s exterior using a 135-foot crane and “at least 20 gallons” of imported paint. If suffering is the path to liberation, Ven. Nalaka is making progress—and the monastery is looking sharp.
Exiled art of Myanmar in Texas
Artists are artists and will let you know it.
The one feature of the property that Ven. Nalaka didn’t seem to know about was Sitt Nyein Aye’s artwork, a fact that had my nerves running throughout our interview. But after a bit of wandering,
It starts with his tragic death in Colorado and weaves backwards through his revolutionary work in Burma (Myanmar), exile in the Southwest, and late-career artistic projects.
I sought to examine Sitt’s legacy as a member of a “hyperlocal diaspora” -- Burmese artists, including @chaweithein (Ms. Chaw Ei Thein, profile, art blog) and @artisthteinlin (RIP, Artsy), who’ve found refuge in America and craft vivid portals back home.
(wrappedrockz) (37w) Fascinating. Can’t wait to read more. 🔥
(Roberthoerlein's) Great story. I didn’t know any of this. Thanks.
AUTHOR: obscuratorial (37w) 📷 PHOTOS: 1-3 are by my dad, Mark Eddy. The rest are by me, of Sitt Nyein Aye's untitled 2012 painting at Sitagu Buddha Vihara. The piece depicts some revered Buddhist temples in India. Source
Beginner's Mind (Japanese 初心 or shoshin) is a concept from Zen Buddhism. It means it's better to have an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of expectations or preconceptions when practicing meditation and exploring Dharma. Even at an advanced level, approach Truth as a beginner would.
Beginner's Mind is especially used in the study of Zen Buddhism and Japanese martial arts [1]. It became popular outside Japan because of Shunryū Suzuki's book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
The practice of shoshin acts as a counter to the hubris and closed-mindedness often associated with thinking of oneself as an adept or expert [2].
When we let ourselves think we know everything, we leave no room for surprises, but reality is full of surprises.
For example, in the Einstellung Effect, a person becomes so accustomed to a certain way of doing things that s/he does not consider or acknowledge new ideas or approaches [3], such as thinking outside the box. Like let's say someone asks you, "Who are YOU?"
One more TikTok, hookup, sext, hit of dopamine
"I'm me," you say. Then this exchange takes place:
"You're not who you think you are."
"I'm who other people think I am."
"No, you're not even that."
"But, but, what else is there? If I'm not who I think I am, and I'm not who others think I am, do I just not exist?"
"No, you are who you think others think you are."
"Oh, yeah, because we're social creatures, right? There's always that [performative] factor of being watched, even if we only think we're being watched."
"Something like that."
"Ah, what do you know?"
"Hey, at least I got you to think outside the box, realize it's not binary -- a this or that, thesis or antithesis. There's often a synthesis, an interaction, a third or fourth option not thought of within the confines of the assumptions surrounding the question."
"Oh, yeah, huh?"
"Monkey."
The word shoshin combines sho (Japanese 初, "beginner" or "initial") and shin (Japanese 心, "mind" or "heart") [4], which is not necessarily the brain but the intuition, knowing, heart, or the ability to discern. More
Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967–circa April 5, 1994) was an American punk, emo, alternative rock musician and a member of the infamous 27 Club. He was the lead vocalist, guitarist, primary songwriter, and a founding member of the grunge band Nirvana, a name he chose when he found out that in Buddhism the definition of nirvana is "the end of suffering." Through his angsty songwriting and anti-establishment persona, he widened the thematic conventions of mainstream rock music. He was heralded as a spokesman of Generation X and is widely recognized as one of the most influential rock musicians. More
(Asmongold TV) Kurt Cobain didn't kill himself. (They found proof). [And a hired private investigator came to the conclusion that it was his drug addict wife Courtney Love.]
Syd Barrett after acid (LSD) at age 27
The Pink Floyd Sound with Syd (on right)
Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett (Jan. 6, 1946–July 7, 2006) was an English singer, guitarist, and songwriter who co-founded the rock band Pink Floyd in 1965. Until his permanent departure in 1968, he was Pink Floyd's frontman and primary songwriter, known for his whimsical style of psychedelia and stream-of-consciousness writing [1, 6]. He was already absent and undependable by 1967. As a guitarist, he was influential for his free-form playing and for employing effects such as dissonance, distortion, echo, and feedback. More: Syd Barrett
“Complete pr*ck”: Pink Floyd's Roger Waters destroys U2's Bono over Israel collaboration
F Trump. Here's his fake HAMAS "peace" deal.
(Katie Halper) Oct. 4, 2025: Roger Waters (one of the founders of Pink Floyd and its main songwriter) joins The Katie Halper Show to talk about Gaza, Israel, the U.N., free speech, what he wants the president of Colombia to do. Plus, he reacts to the latest crackdowns on speech, the war in Ukraine, and why some musicians are such cowards when it comes to Israel. For the full discussion, please join on Patreon at: patreon-full-140151702
00:00 What the heaven is up with Regina Spektor?
02:13 What the heaven is up with U2's Bono?
03:08 What the heaven is up with Nick Cave?
05:22 What the heaven is up with non-Jews being pro-Israel?
08:46 What the heaven is up with U2?
09:53 What the heaven is up with Thom Yorke of Radiohead’s email address?
11:03 What the heaven is up with Gwenyth Paltrow and Chris Martin?
ABOUT: Roger Waters is a singer, songwriter, and legendary musician best known for being a member of the epic rock band Pink Floyd. He's also an outspoken American activist for peace, a free Palestine, several other causes that get him in trouble, like hating Trump's corruption.
Please support The Katie Halper Show. For bonus content, exclusive interviews, to support independent media and to help make this program possible, please join on Patreon: thekatiehalpershow. Katie Halper Show merch: katiehalper.myspreadshop.com/all. Follow on Twitter (x.com/kthalps), Instagram (kthalps), TikTok (kthalps).
There's no comparison to Beatle George Harrison, who wrote and sings this masterpiece, while nearly all the credit for the band's greatness goes to the other two competing with each other, and no one even remembers Pete Best. What about Ringo? Who?
LYRICS: I look at you all, see the love there that's sleeping / While my guitar gently weeps / I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping / Still, my guitar gently weeps // I don't know why nobody told you / How to unfold your love / I don't know how someone controlled you / They bought and sold you // I look at the world and I notice it's turning / While my guitar gently weeps / With every mistake, we must surely be learning / Still, my guitar gently weeps / I don't know how you were diverted / You were perverted, too / I don't know how you were inverted / No one alerted you / I look at you all, see the love there that's sleeping / While my guitar gently weeps / (I look) Look at you all / Still, my guitar gently weeps / Oh, oh / Yeah, yeah
We weep for the world -- steeped in ignorance, the root of all harm, giving rise to greed (lust) and aversion (fear), liking and disliking, the Roots of Good and Evil. Who cares if someone is good or evil? That person is going to care when the RESULTS come around. Karma really brings about what we experience, what we are experiencing now. So it is vital to grasp what "karma" means and what it doesn't. The greatest karma meme ever sums it up, a picture of credit card with the slogan: "Karma: It's everywhere you're going to be." (That's based on an old credit card commercial, which if people have never seen it because the successful marketing campaign ended a long time ago, may not get the impact of why it's a clever meme and a vital message/warning. If we knew that everything was going to follow us, none of it unseen or forgotten, we might behave differently, very differently. But we think we're getting away with everything, think there is nothing to come of this (what we do, say, and think). Pink Floyd has a great song about this from the CD Animals called "Sheep."
What do you get for pretending the danger's not real?
Meek and obedient shall follow the leader
down well-trodden corridors into the Valley of Steel
What a surprise, a look of terminal shock in your eyes!
WARNING: Graphic language (cussing/profanity), police brutality of peaceful demonstrators, racism
Policing in America: Last Week Tonight
(LastWeekTonight)
Nov. 24, 2024: This look back is from Season 7, Episode 14, from June 7th, 2020. As nationwide protests over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor [Blacks killed by racist and/or implicitly biased police] are met with police brutality, John Oliver discusses how the histories of policing and white supremacy are intertwined, the roadblocks to fixing things, and some potential paths forward. (Who is LAPD Police Chief Michel Moore?)
Connect with Last Week Tonight online...YouTube for more almost news as it almost happens on Facebook like your mom would, on Twitter for news about jokes and jokes about news, or the official site for all that other stuff at once: hbo.com/lastweektonight
(The Jimmy Dore Show) Feb. 4, 2024: Former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters has been a longtime supporter of the Palestinian people and humanitarian concerns, as well as a harsh critic of fascism and Trump.
But now Israel is attacking Gaza is under attack Waters is being criticized as an antisemite — to the extent that his music publisher has severed ties with the aging rocker.
Guest host Russell Dobular is joined by Due Dissidence’s Keaton Weiss to discuss how misplaced and insincere the criticism of Waters is as the Zionist lobby seeks to silence its prominent detractors.
It's easy to blame Jews, but we need to distinguish Zionist-Jews from religious, cultural, and ordinary secular Jews. It is the Zionists who are committing genocide in the name of all Jews. And that's a crime against humanity. Not in our name!
That's what the lengthy explanation was for. Is greed good or bad? Actually, it depends how one defines "greed/" Sure, in English it's bad. That's why early British translators of Buddhist sutras into English chose it.
The Buddhist term lobha is meant to connote the bad parts of craving, grasping, greediness, selfishness, possessiveness, clinginess, avarice, stinginess, the unwillingness to share, to help, to care for others. Of course, that's bad.
The enlightened self-interest to plant seeds of good that will only serve us later (unless the mental karma bears its results much sooner, that feeling of contentment, health, generosity, and the Four Divine Abidings or Brahmaviharas).
That is to say, giving, sharing, and sacrificing for others is SO good that, later, one will regret not doing it when one had a chance. Give. Help. Comfort others. We certainly will wish for comfort and kindness. Will we have set out the causes and conditions to receive it? This world is ruled by karma, the ability of deeds to give rise to a later result on a moral plane.
It is wholly wrong to think that someone is going to thank us, that a hungry dog is not going to bite the hand that attempts to feed it. "No good deed goes unpunished." But that is NOT karma. Karma is the fruiting, the ripening of a deed. That act has not yet ripened. So it may be that we have a dog bite, but it is not at all true that we have exhausted our well-intentioned act to provide a canine with sustenance when it was hungry.
King, let go as I let go. It's good.
If we learn nothing else about giving and power of giving, we should know a famous quote the Buddha uttered concerning nongreed (alobha).
So greed (a self-centered unwillingness to give) is bad.
What? Why? "You just said greed was good."
To be exact, Gordon Gekko said it was good. We just found a way in which that statement is self-evidently true. It's semantics. Is greed good? Well, it's good in a common way of speaking, using the meaning of the word "good" in the sense of meaning "what will work."
Will greed work? Will it make someone rich? It could in the short run. What the Buddha was talking about, what we are talking about, is the long run, the full course of the karma (action) playing out. Steal out of greed. What that act of stealing comes to fruition, will it be looked back on as having been a good deed? No way. The act of stealing is incapable of yielding (karmically resulting in) a welcome, pleasing, pleasant, wished for result. But what happens immediately (like being in possession of what was stolen) may indeed feel pleasant and may alleviate the painful desire when one did not have it. That good feeling is NOT the karmic result (vipaka or phala) of stealing. What is? Deprivation, neediness, wanting, poverty, and so on -- the very things one did not want, was trying to avoid, wished to be rid of. IF one knew the results of bad karma, one would not do it. The results are too painful, too exponential (one single deed bearing many unwelcome results). One would do good deeds because of the pleasant results, which are also exponential. One act of giving leads to receiving many times over. It's a kind of thing of which one might say, "It's not fair. It's not right. It's not just." We know neither what we did in the past (in countless past lives) nor what others did in the past, so how could we begin to judge either ourselves or others or what's fair and what's not? We judge in utter ignorance, full of wrong view (miccha ditthi), and we become confused and confuse others. A Buddha emerges from the world, explains things, and we fail to learn that Teaching that would guide us to the good and be of such benefit. We needn't give up our favorite religion or cultural attachment to learn or practice the Dharma. But, indeed, this Dharma, this Teaching, this Path runs against the stream, counter to our customs. If we were already living in the right way to eventually make us happy and fulfilled, what need would there have been for a Buddha to teach anything? It would be superfluous. But exactly because we have been living for a long time in the wrong way, in a way that yields suffering after suffering (disappointment after disappointment, dukkha in all its forms), the Buddha had something to say, something vital, something of use to the many blind beings with no idea what reality is.
How is greed good? Let's say you're going out tonight because you want to meet someone, and you ask me, "Is this cologne good?" (It stinks! And you smell like a horny skunk!) So, yeah, it's good -- inasmuch as it will get you the attention you seek in the Meat Market you'll be visiting, where everyone's drinking and carousing, being deafened and blinded by drums and lights from a disco ball.
Greed is bad (avarice leads to ruin), which should be obvious but obviously isn't because we need an enlightened world teacher to tell us, "Hey, watch out for this motivation." Greed, in English, means going too far. "How much is enough?" Charlie Sheen asks the Gordon Gekko character. Gordon came up from the streets, so it's not a matter of enough. It's a matter of winning, of taking it all.
And that's the thing with money and sensuality and worldly things, "One thing is too much, and all of it is not enough." Alcohol, for example. One drink is too much, yet all the drinks is still not enough. Stealing one dollar is too much, yet stealing all the dollars would not be enough." That wouldn't fill the void, fulfill us, satisfy us, satiate us, bring us contentment. The same with coke, heroin, sex partners, cars, real estate, gold bars, flesh, fame, glory, and on and on.
What could possibly fill the void?
Sir, no cash is allowed in the safe deposit boxes.
But, wait, that's not all. That's not what's wrong with greed. There's something much worse. Not only will it never lead to satisfaction or contentment (whereas internal letting go would), it is going to lead to a lot of troubles.
The Sigala Sutta lists some of them, but karma (what goes around comes around, justice, getting back from the world what we give to others, crime and punishment, cause and effects, law of attraction, calling into our experience what we put other through, and so on) can be thought of as the results of our deed or deeds. Even one deed has many results. Many deeds have an exponential number of results.
Out of greed, I screw over my business partner. Not satisfied with my portion of the profits, I take that person's portion, too. That's greed, right? That's what the English term means. So so far we've been talking about the result of just going after and getting our portion, but now we see what greed is really like. Greed is bad because I can't get enough, and I start to steal more. Does stealing more get me what I want? No. Not good. Now, instead of a fat pension, a golden parachute, a mansion, and a gorgeous arm charm, I'm facing charges, fines, lawyer's bills, and ignominy. Greed has ruined everything. Far from getting me what I wanted, it got me exactly what I didn't want, what I tried so hard to avoid. How could it be? I thought Greed was my friend! Some friend. The Sigala Sutta could have taught us about bad friends and good ones.
Greed leads to ruin, to constant dissatisfaction, to a feeling of poverty and want even when we have plenty. American capitalism is like that.
Killing Osage Indians for cash
There's a better way English writers call "enlightened self-interest." That means creating win-win situations wherever we go. I take from a business, but I make sure that business keeps going, keeps producing, keeps making everyone rich. I keep them healthy to keep myself healthy. I make them healthy to make myself healthy. I, rather than only thinking of myself in a selfish and self-absorbed way, think of others as a means of preserving myself. That means that wherever I go, everyone is happy to see me, happy with me, praising my actions, and profiting me over the long term. Doesn't that sound much better than being greedy, being selfish, being all about Number One? Of course. It's probably harder to do, so people do the easy and come to ruin. Not all greedy people succeed, so greed is not good. Greed is bad. Greed is bad because even when it works (in getting us what we wanted), it screws us in also getting us exactly what we didn't want.
The Buddha pointed this out in terms of karma (actions that have the ability to produce their results much later), saying that because of stinginess one will fail to give, and by failing to give, one will not receive. One wants to receive. That's what we want. But it will not happen because we didn't give. We didn't have enlightened self-interest to think of the future beyond what we could see.
The very person who failed to protect others will not be protected, who deprived others will be deprived...will get what comes around. Is that what you wanted? Is that what you called "good"? No, no way. It's the exact opposite of what we wanted. It's unenlightened. It's ignorant. It's hateful and based on fear. Why? Because it's greedy, and greed is that way. Greed, ultimately, is bad. It gets us what we want at the moment, sure, but it gets us a bunch of trouble we never wanted.
Montaigne's French philosophy
The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (via Wiki) had something to say about it. Of greed he thought that
"It is not want, but rather abundance, that creates avarice."
"All moneyed men I conclude to be covetous," and that:
'Tis the greatest folly imaginable to expect that Fortune [Fortuna or Lady Luck] should ever sufficiently arm us against herself;
'Tis with our own arms that we are to fight her;
Accidental ones will betray us in the pinch of the business.
If I lay up, 'tis for some near and contemplated purpose; not to purchase lands, of which I have no need, but to purchase pleasure:
"Non esse cupidum, pecunia est; non esse emacem, vertigal est."
[That is, "Not to be covetous is money; not to be acquisitive is revenue." — Cicero, Paradox, vi. 3.]
"I neither am in any great apprehension of wanting, nor in desire of any more:
"Divinarum fructus est in copia; copiam declarat satietas."
[That is, "The fruit of riches is in abundance; satiety declares abundance." — Idem, ibid., vi. 2.]
"And I am very well pleased that this reformation in me has fallen out in an age naturally inclined to avarice, and that I see myself cleared of a folly so common to old men, and the most ridiculous of all human follies" [40].
Seth MacFarlane. American Dad, "Saga of the Golden Turd"; Pink Floyd; Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly
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