04/16/2023
Yesterday we celebrated the anniversary of Buddhas enlightenment. The whole of the rest of the buddhist world will be celebrating it in May this year. According to them it should have been a tsog day, but most of our members wont have even noticed that.
There are good reasons for these differences, that are worth explaining.
Firstly, and most importantly they are all wrong. They still follow the lunar calendar (Lol, wtf!)
Secondly, our omniscient guru recognised that our business model depends mainly on income from western students (since they tend to have more money and be more trusting of anything that looks a bit oriental without asking difficult questions). Since they all find the lunar calendar too confusing, he decided (out of his omniscient wisdom and infinite compassion) that we should just ditch 2500+ years of tradition, since dates and anniversaries are meaningless anyway (except when we decide otherwise).
We celebrate when we like, and impress upon our students the value of seeing these days as important. Just not important enough for it to matter exactly when anyone else thinks they should be. What is most important is that they trust and obey us, and not question why we have simplified things. They should simply follow unquestioningly and be grateful it has been simplied for their benefit. We do this for all of our most sacred dates, including Tsog days.
All vajrayana students have a commitment to offer tsog on the 10th and 25th day after the new moon, so we ignore that commitment and the bit about the moon, which was given by all past vajra masters, and just do it on the 10th and 25th of every month instead because it probably doesnt make a lot of difference. This means that we miss most of the days that past masters told us to do these practices, and sleep soundly knowing we will make up for it (apart from that extra lunar month and the two days a year that we no longer have to bother with). It isn’t a big fault so why abandon it? It’s not like theres any rules that say we should. (Actually there might be, but we’re too busy selling tickets to our events to check)
After all, it really doesnt matter what the rest of the buddhist world does, because as previously stated they are all wrong, and we are right and celebrating holy days is something we can do fine on our own without them.
Who cares what the moon was doing when buddha acheived enlightenment? We should focus on our own enlightenment instead of worrying about his. It was a long time ago anyway. It was the 15th of April and thats all anyone really needs to understand or worry about.
Practicing in this way means we can focus on our own path purely without being distracted by meaningless things, such as a sense of being part of a wider community, or mutual respect, and any sense of animosity arising from these differences will keep our students loyal exclusively to us, rather than wanting to explore more confusing alternatives that might suit them better or teach them things we have decided they’d be better off not knowing. How wonderful!
We know Buddha would have approved to see this Dharma Wisdom® being put into practice!
