Mount Meru
I went to a good teaching tonight by Khenpo Tsering Samdup at the Chicago Bodhi Path Center. Oooo I love living in a city with multiple means of education.... Anyway, tonight's discussion was on Karma, as based on Gampopa's book The Jewel Ornament of Liberation. There was also a brief discussion of Tibetan Buddhist Cosmology, which finally made some sense (to me). In that cosmology, there is a central mountain, Meru, surrounded by an ocean in which appear four continents. We currently live on the southern continent. Hang with me here.... We also talked about collective karma, and how the karma of a group of people "makes" their collective situation. For example, the karma of the group of people born into the USA makes good ol' America what it is. Extrapolating, with my lightning-fast logic, I realized that the collective karma of all people (and other sentient beings here) generated the Earth. And similarly the Universe, and similarly all the way back to th
