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Japan Launches 'Buddha Phone'
CNETNate writes "The Japanese Odin 99 handset isn't a regular video-enabled phone. It's geared, perhaps somewhat ironically, towards the Buddhist geek. Aside from regular cell phone features, a dedicated button loads a private, customizable, animated altar on the phone's screen. The idea is to allow Buddhists to perform their dedications conveniently on-the-go. You can simulate incense burning, purification rites and play music to help you meditate wherever you happen to be. The question is, does such a device somewhat negate the values a Buddhist would stand for?"
From a Buddhist perspective the physical act of doing their rituals is rather arbitrary, as the reality in which we live is an illusion. Thereby it's the end result on a spiritual level which is what is important. If you approach your rites on a physical altar, digital altar, or on an altar even in your own mind, it's all the same.
Actually, it depends on what tradition of Buddhism the practitioner follows, their personal path, his or her Guru or Teacher (if they have one), that guru's teaching style, and not least of all the individual's personality and life situation. I spent five years as a live-in volunteer at a Buddhist center where I practiced and received traditional training and met many Buddhists of many types, with and without cell phones; simple westerners that were ordained monks and Tibetan Rinpoches who drove Mercedes.
The idea that a Buddhist is some Vietnamese guy with saffron robes and a shaved head chanting "Ommm" all day is not quite in touch with reality. I am not directing this at you personally but at your posts blasé answer: I have found in my conversations that the majority of people who voice any opinion about Buddhism have gleaned their learning from pop culture and suffer greatly from the root cause of samsara: ignorance.
It's a Chinese-made phone available in China and Hong Kong. Submitter should comprehend what s/he reads. CNET reporting CNET Japan reporting on a Chinese product does not make it a Japanese product or a Japanese launch.
That would be the answer according to a dualistic, naive conception of reality and causality (which most of us have, most of the time) but it's not the correct answer in the Buddhist version of the story.
In the traditional story, the 'third monk' is actually the teacher of the other two monks. Following their two inadequate answers, he rebukes them and says:
"It is the mind that moves."
The monks' answers are deemed inadequate because they are dualistic: they make a distinction, in a fundamental way, between the wind and the flag (and, in fact, movement as such), and then try to think whether movement begins with the one or with the other, or whether movement can be considered apart from that which moves.
But to distinguish 'movement', 'flag', or 'wind' as particularities of what is, beforehand, an unparticularised situation, is a movement of the mind. It is the monks' dualistically inclined minds which move towards a view, and any particular view is partial and therefore inadequate. So the master's answer is the 'correct' one, as it's the most accurate and apposite statement of what's happening.