FINDING BUDDHA AND GETTING A LIFE
John Budris, Globe Correspondent
835 words
16 July 2006
The Boston Globe
THIRD
M6
English
© 2006 New York Times Company. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Perry Garfinkel's bon voyage in search of Buddha reads like a Seinfeld script. The fiftysomething Jewish guy from New Jersey lay on his back on his mother's parlor carpet. Plagued by a fast disintegrating spinal disk, and a similarly pinched bank account, Garfinkel's life infrastructure was collapsing. Even mom, it seemed, was a study in lack of support.
"You don't have a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out," she admonished him on the eve of his departure on a six-month circumnavigation of the globe to trace the footsteps of Buddha for National Geographic magazine.
If the central tenets of Buddhism remind followers that most of life is tedious, all hell breaks loose from time to time, and suffering is inevitable, Garfinkel was stalking nirvana before he even got to the airport.
A half year later, with his article on the cover of the December 2005 international edition, Garfinkel conceded that his wealth of material was too rich for only 22 pages. He went back to his desk, and the result is "Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness, and the Man Who Found Them All."
The book is largely defined by what it is not. Not self help. Not philosophy. Certainly not religion. Garfinkel, who lives on Martha's Vineyard, sins his way around the world. Fast enough for the beach yet dense enough for the scholar's library, "Buddha or Bust" is an internal adventure story.
As John McPhee and Paul Theroux offer lush descriptions of physical landscapes in their works, Garfinkel surveys the internal world with equal scrutiny. The plot points of his itinerary play a supporting role to his and his subjects' spiritual reactions to the circumstances around them.
As Garfinkel explores the contemporary applications of Buddhism, which he describes as a "2,500-year-old survival manual for a ridiculous world," these circumstances take him to disparate places. As expected, he literally traces the historical footsteps of the born prince Siddhartha Gautama who like a rock star became known by a single name, Buddha through Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China, and Tibet. But Garfinkel's mission to separate Buddhist fact from fiction also takes him to a retreat at Auschwitz, hospices in California, and a New Delhi prison where inmates are offered Buddhist-inspired seminars on the pleasures of peace. He even finds a taste of nirvana in the sushi served at a baseball game in Japan.
The book's greatest success is the gentle juggling of scholarly history and contemporary context. Just when the Buddha's time lines and travels get a little thick and dusty, Garfinkel ropes the reader into the present. He describes the Buddha as the "original baby boomer, indulged by his parents' opulence and depressed by their empty materialism, a guy who was in need of a long road trip to clean out his head."
Were it not for his initial incomplete homework on Buddhism and the equal naivete of the editors at National Geographic who evaluated his pitch Garfinkel's journey of enlightenment may have remained stateside. Central to his proposal was the notion that Buddhism and its practitioners were averse to war. How wrong he was became clear when he arrived in Sri Lanka, where the minority Hindu and Muslim Tamils and the Buddhist majority Sinhalese have slaughtered each other for decades in the name of religion.
A book about Buddhism without the Dalai Lama would be akin to a baseball history absent Babe Ruth. Garfinkel scored the ultimate mano-a-mano with his holiness by a combination of perseverance and preparation.
"The whole idea of interviewing the Dalai Lama was intimidating," he writes. "It's also quite impressive. Try saying it out loud in front of a mirror as though you were telling friends at a dinner party: `I'm going to do a one-on-one interview with the Dalai Lama. . . .' Right there alone in the bathroom, you will impress even yourself. I did. And then think about . . . conducting an interview that will keep him interested and a paralyzing intimidation quickly sets in. I did and it did."
Garfinkel's impressive legwork kept the Dalai Lama intrigued far beyond the scheduled hour. A month earlier, he had traveled to the Dalai Lama's native village in Tibet and had become friends with the leader's relatives, in hopes a few anecdotes from home would break the ice. In fact, according to Garfinkel, it rather melted the holy man's heart.
In "Buddha or Bust," Garfinkel takes a prodigious 2,500 years of history, geopolitics, religion, love, and death, and manages to digest it all. No small accomplishment.
Contact John Budris, editor of Hall of Fame Magazine, at jbudris@HOFMAG.com.
BOOK REVIEW Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness, and the Man Who Found Them All By Perry Garfinkel Random House, 336 pp., $24.95
Friday, August 31, 2007
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse - reincarnated and reviewed by David L. Ulin
Book Review; Features Desk
A classic, reincarnated
David L. Ulin
373 words
16 July 2006
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
R-9
English
Copyright 2006 The Los Angeles Times
HERMANN HESSE'S novel "Siddhartha" (Modern Library: 130 pp., $16.95) is a countercultural icon, a totem of youth in revolt. First published in 1922, this fable about a contemporary of the Buddha struck a chord in the 1960s among a generation alienated by the affectations of the middle class.
For them, Hesse's Siddhartha was a role model, a wealthy Brahmin who turned his back on privilege to become a Samana, or wandering ascetic, then gave up that path as well to pursue a destiny uniquely his own. Subtitled "An Indian Poem," the novel -- which has just been reissued in a luminous new translation by Susan Bernofsky, with an introduction by novelist Tom Robbins -- is perhaps best read as a kind of allegory, a parable of the examined life.
Although Hesse won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946, he has often been dismissed as a gateway writer, one whose work is significant primarily for helping lead readers to harder stuff. Yet such a characterization is unfair on many levels, not least in regard to this novel, which may be his most misunderstood. For all its youth culture resonance, "Siddhartha" is hardly a book for young readers -- its subject is the way a single life goes through many incarnations, from, in Siddhartha's case, student to mendicant to businessman to seeker to saint.
More to the point, it argues for that simplest yet most elusive of doctrines: the necessity of thinking for oneself. What's remarkable about Siddhartha is not that he achieves enlightenment but that he does so without a guru, without following anything other than the dictates of his heart. He walks away from every teacher he encounters, even the Buddha himself.
"One can pass on knowledge but not wisdom," Siddhartha explains at the end of the novel. "One can find wisdom, one can live it, one can be supported by it, one can work wonders with it, but one cannot speak it or teach it." It is the importance of keeping one's own counsel that Hesse is espousing, the notion that only by looking inward can we come to terms with the world.
A classic, reincarnated
David L. Ulin
373 words
16 July 2006
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
R-9
English
Copyright 2006 The Los Angeles Times
HERMANN HESSE'S novel "Siddhartha" (Modern Library: 130 pp., $16.95) is a countercultural icon, a totem of youth in revolt. First published in 1922, this fable about a contemporary of the Buddha struck a chord in the 1960s among a generation alienated by the affectations of the middle class.
For them, Hesse's Siddhartha was a role model, a wealthy Brahmin who turned his back on privilege to become a Samana, or wandering ascetic, then gave up that path as well to pursue a destiny uniquely his own. Subtitled "An Indian Poem," the novel -- which has just been reissued in a luminous new translation by Susan Bernofsky, with an introduction by novelist Tom Robbins -- is perhaps best read as a kind of allegory, a parable of the examined life.
Although Hesse won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946, he has often been dismissed as a gateway writer, one whose work is significant primarily for helping lead readers to harder stuff. Yet such a characterization is unfair on many levels, not least in regard to this novel, which may be his most misunderstood. For all its youth culture resonance, "Siddhartha" is hardly a book for young readers -- its subject is the way a single life goes through many incarnations, from, in Siddhartha's case, student to mendicant to businessman to seeker to saint.
More to the point, it argues for that simplest yet most elusive of doctrines: the necessity of thinking for oneself. What's remarkable about Siddhartha is not that he achieves enlightenment but that he does so without a guru, without following anything other than the dictates of his heart. He walks away from every teacher he encounters, even the Buddha himself.
"One can pass on knowledge but not wisdom," Siddhartha explains at the end of the novel. "One can find wisdom, one can live it, one can be supported by it, one can work wonders with it, but one cannot speak it or teach it." It is the importance of keeping one's own counsel that Hesse is espousing, the notion that only by looking inward can we come to terms with the world.
The last how-to; The Tibetan Book of the Dead Translated by Gyurme Dorje
Book Review; Features Desk
The last how-to; The Tibetan Book of the Dead Translated by Gyurme Dorje Edited by Graham Coleman with Thupten Jinpa Introduction by the Dalai Lama Viking: 536 pp., $29.95
Jon Fasman
Jon Fasman is the author of "The Geographer's Library: A Novel."
1383 words
19 February 2006
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
R-12
English
Copyright 2006 The Los Angeles Times
For The Record; Los Angeles Times Wednesday February 22, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 37 words Type of Material: Correction; Tibetan Book of the Dead -- A review of a new translation in Sunday's Book Review said Padmasambhava was credited with introducing Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th century BC. In fact, it was the 8th century.; For The Record; Los Angeles Times Sunday February 26, 2006 Home Edition Book Review Part R Page 10 Features Desk 1 inches; 38 words Type of Material: Correction; Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Feb. 19 review of a new translation of the book said that Padmasambhava is credited with introducing Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th century BC. It fact, it was the 8th century.
THE Bardo Thodol, known to us as "The Tibetan Book of the Dead," is a religious book like no other: Whereas the holy writings of the Abrahamic faiths teach their adherents how to live, "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" instructs its readers on how to die. Or, more precisely, it provides both advice and, apparently, experiential accounts designed to teach readers how to successfully navigate bardo -- the spiritual condition that immediately follows death -- and to assist loved ones in that state.
The largest and richest section of the book, "The Great Liberation by Hearing," first appeared in English in 1927, thanks to Walter Evans-Wentz, an American who discovered it while traveling in India. Carl Jung loved the book. So, alas, did Timothy Leary and his acolytes, who saw in it what they most loved: themselves, on acid. To say that Leary and Ralph Metzner's "The Psychedelic Experience," a guide to experiencing an acid trip, is based on "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" is like saying that the governing system of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is based on Thomas Jefferson's writings. "The Great Liberation by Hearing" became the "Infinite Jest" of the late 1960s: a signifier on a shelf, intended to be noticed rather than read (this is not, of course, to denigrate David Foster Wallace's enormous and excellent novel). Now Viking presents us with the text of the entire book, newly translated and illustrated, and with an introduction by the Dalai Lama.
"The Tibetan Book of the Dead's" closest analogue in Western literature is not the Bible but Dante's "Divine Comedy." Whereas Dante relished describing the punishments meted out to the putatively wicked, Padmasambhava (the Indian yogi credited with introducing Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th century BC and with this book's authorship) is soothingly humane. More important, Dante created a vast cosmology in which recognizable people receive punishment or reward in the afterlife based on their earthly deeds, but Buddhism posits no such permanent soul. What Jews or Christians find recognizable as an individual soul, explains the Dalai Lama in his lucid introduction, "is understood in terms of a dynamic interdependent relationship of both mental and physical attributes" -- entirely conditioned by events of this world and therefore as finite as life.
In the West, Buddhism remains more talked about than studied, and it has an exotic reputation, centered on such bold, decontextualized ideas as renunciation and asceticism. Readers of this book might similarly find themselves attracted to the exotic -- the pantheon of multicolored gods and bodhisattvas, repeated appeals to the universal "child of Buddha nature" and the esoteric symbology: "If the semen of a man is reddish, he may die or be subjected to slander after six months." Or consider this one:
If one dreams of eating faeces,
Or wearing black clothes of yak hair whilst plunging downwards,
... Or of copulating repeatedly with a black figure or animal,
These are also signs, which are indicative of death.
There's plenty of this sort of material to dig through. But what comes across more strongly is the calm, good-humored, persistent compassion of the narrator, who bombards his readers with second chances and different ways of achieving liberation from the cycle of birth and death.
For this is what "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" offers at its core: not stories of human encounters with an anthropomorphized figure of divinity, or specific counsel on how to live correctly, but advice on how to successfully pass through the state that follows physical death and precedes spiritual rebirth. "The Great Liberation by Hearing" presents prayers for a spiritual teacher or loved one to say at the bedside of the dying, along with signs to recognize whether the prayers have proved successful. Each set of prayers leads into the next with a clause that starts with "if," in case the deceased has not understood. In this way, the narrator offers many opportunities for liberation; he seems steadfastly on the side of the dead rather than, pace Dante, on the side of those inflicting punishments.
Just who this narrator is remains enticingly mysterious -- his life story sounds like a canny tale written by Umberto Eco. What today comprises the complete "Tibetan Book of the Dead" seems to be part of a vast store of teachings that Padmasambhava and his disciples left scattered at sacred locations throughout the Tibetan plateau. He feared his oral teachings would become corrupted in subsequent retellings and wanted to leave a purer record. In fact, he prophesied that these hidden teachings would be found one day during a time of turmoil and crises:
In the future, during the final era, the degenerate age,
When monks [act] like pigs and make women pregnant,
... In that age, a supremely fortunate son will be born.
... And he will be the courageous "Karma Lingpa,"
On his right thigh there will be a mole,
Resembling the eye of pristine cognition,
And he will be born in the dragon or snake year.
A young man named Karma Lingpa did, in fact, extract several of Padmasambhava's teachings from Mt. Gampodar and transmitted them in written form. In the mid-18th century, the first xylographic (woodcut) edition was created. From there it was just a hop, skip and a jump to the Viking treasure we have today.
And a treasure it certainly is, for believers and skeptics alike: a structurally intricate, lyrical, poetic evocation of a cosmography that encompasses the universe. It opens with quotidian prayers for openness and for one's spiritual teacher, moves on to analyze the essence of liberation, examines in great and strange detail various signs of impending death, discusses different ways of achieving liberation, throws in a masked drama depicting the meeting of good and evil archetypes with "the embodiment of the inexorable laws of cause and effect in the intermediate state of rebirth" (a drama that is still widely performed at monasteries across the Himalayas). It ends with an explication of mantras to be repeated toward liberation.
These mantras are streams of capitalized syllables -- "YE DHARMA HETUPRABHAVA HETUN RESAM TATHAGATO BHAVAT" -- and are one of the purest, rawest representations of ecstasy in any work of literature. The cry "How wonderful!" is repeated and interspersed throughout these sections. As the liberated believer is freed from the endless cycle of rebirth and suffering, so these mantras leave behind the structure of sensibility and coherent thought
Or not. This is just a theory, one perilously close to the self-regarding Leary-esque interpretation that ultimately fails to illuminate non-Buddhist readers. At the core of this book is an insistent wisdom that death comes to everyone, and, contra the poet Philip Larkin, that, in fact, it is different whined at than withstood. Knowing how to die -- with grace, hope and good humor -- is essential to knowing how to live.
The last how-to; The Tibetan Book of the Dead Translated by Gyurme Dorje Edited by Graham Coleman with Thupten Jinpa Introduction by the Dalai Lama Viking: 536 pp., $29.95
Jon Fasman
Jon Fasman is the author of "The Geographer's Library: A Novel."
1383 words
19 February 2006
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
R-12
English
Copyright 2006 The Los Angeles Times
For The Record; Los Angeles Times Wednesday February 22, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 37 words Type of Material: Correction; Tibetan Book of the Dead -- A review of a new translation in Sunday's Book Review said Padmasambhava was credited with introducing Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th century BC. In fact, it was the 8th century.; For The Record; Los Angeles Times Sunday February 26, 2006 Home Edition Book Review Part R Page 10 Features Desk 1 inches; 38 words Type of Material: Correction; Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Feb. 19 review of a new translation of the book said that Padmasambhava is credited with introducing Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th century BC. It fact, it was the 8th century.
THE Bardo Thodol, known to us as "The Tibetan Book of the Dead," is a religious book like no other: Whereas the holy writings of the Abrahamic faiths teach their adherents how to live, "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" instructs its readers on how to die. Or, more precisely, it provides both advice and, apparently, experiential accounts designed to teach readers how to successfully navigate bardo -- the spiritual condition that immediately follows death -- and to assist loved ones in that state.
The largest and richest section of the book, "The Great Liberation by Hearing," first appeared in English in 1927, thanks to Walter Evans-Wentz, an American who discovered it while traveling in India. Carl Jung loved the book. So, alas, did Timothy Leary and his acolytes, who saw in it what they most loved: themselves, on acid. To say that Leary and Ralph Metzner's "The Psychedelic Experience," a guide to experiencing an acid trip, is based on "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" is like saying that the governing system of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is based on Thomas Jefferson's writings. "The Great Liberation by Hearing" became the "Infinite Jest" of the late 1960s: a signifier on a shelf, intended to be noticed rather than read (this is not, of course, to denigrate David Foster Wallace's enormous and excellent novel). Now Viking presents us with the text of the entire book, newly translated and illustrated, and with an introduction by the Dalai Lama.
"The Tibetan Book of the Dead's" closest analogue in Western literature is not the Bible but Dante's "Divine Comedy." Whereas Dante relished describing the punishments meted out to the putatively wicked, Padmasambhava (the Indian yogi credited with introducing Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th century BC and with this book's authorship) is soothingly humane. More important, Dante created a vast cosmology in which recognizable people receive punishment or reward in the afterlife based on their earthly deeds, but Buddhism posits no such permanent soul. What Jews or Christians find recognizable as an individual soul, explains the Dalai Lama in his lucid introduction, "is understood in terms of a dynamic interdependent relationship of both mental and physical attributes" -- entirely conditioned by events of this world and therefore as finite as life.
In the West, Buddhism remains more talked about than studied, and it has an exotic reputation, centered on such bold, decontextualized ideas as renunciation and asceticism. Readers of this book might similarly find themselves attracted to the exotic -- the pantheon of multicolored gods and bodhisattvas, repeated appeals to the universal "child of Buddha nature" and the esoteric symbology: "If the semen of a man is reddish, he may die or be subjected to slander after six months." Or consider this one:
If one dreams of eating faeces,
Or wearing black clothes of yak hair whilst plunging downwards,
... Or of copulating repeatedly with a black figure or animal,
These are also signs, which are indicative of death.
There's plenty of this sort of material to dig through. But what comes across more strongly is the calm, good-humored, persistent compassion of the narrator, who bombards his readers with second chances and different ways of achieving liberation from the cycle of birth and death.
For this is what "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" offers at its core: not stories of human encounters with an anthropomorphized figure of divinity, or specific counsel on how to live correctly, but advice on how to successfully pass through the state that follows physical death and precedes spiritual rebirth. "The Great Liberation by Hearing" presents prayers for a spiritual teacher or loved one to say at the bedside of the dying, along with signs to recognize whether the prayers have proved successful. Each set of prayers leads into the next with a clause that starts with "if," in case the deceased has not understood. In this way, the narrator offers many opportunities for liberation; he seems steadfastly on the side of the dead rather than, pace Dante, on the side of those inflicting punishments.
Just who this narrator is remains enticingly mysterious -- his life story sounds like a canny tale written by Umberto Eco. What today comprises the complete "Tibetan Book of the Dead" seems to be part of a vast store of teachings that Padmasambhava and his disciples left scattered at sacred locations throughout the Tibetan plateau. He feared his oral teachings would become corrupted in subsequent retellings and wanted to leave a purer record. In fact, he prophesied that these hidden teachings would be found one day during a time of turmoil and crises:
In the future, during the final era, the degenerate age,
When monks [act] like pigs and make women pregnant,
... In that age, a supremely fortunate son will be born.
... And he will be the courageous "Karma Lingpa,"
On his right thigh there will be a mole,
Resembling the eye of pristine cognition,
And he will be born in the dragon or snake year.
A young man named Karma Lingpa did, in fact, extract several of Padmasambhava's teachings from Mt. Gampodar and transmitted them in written form. In the mid-18th century, the first xylographic (woodcut) edition was created. From there it was just a hop, skip and a jump to the Viking treasure we have today.
And a treasure it certainly is, for believers and skeptics alike: a structurally intricate, lyrical, poetic evocation of a cosmography that encompasses the universe. It opens with quotidian prayers for openness and for one's spiritual teacher, moves on to analyze the essence of liberation, examines in great and strange detail various signs of impending death, discusses different ways of achieving liberation, throws in a masked drama depicting the meeting of good and evil archetypes with "the embodiment of the inexorable laws of cause and effect in the intermediate state of rebirth" (a drama that is still widely performed at monasteries across the Himalayas). It ends with an explication of mantras to be repeated toward liberation.
These mantras are streams of capitalized syllables -- "YE DHARMA HETUPRABHAVA HETUN RESAM TATHAGATO BHAVAT" -- and are one of the purest, rawest representations of ecstasy in any work of literature. The cry "How wonderful!" is repeated and interspersed throughout these sections. As the liberated believer is freed from the endless cycle of rebirth and suffering, so these mantras leave behind the structure of sensibility and coherent thought
Or not. This is just a theory, one perilously close to the self-regarding Leary-esque interpretation that ultimately fails to illuminate non-Buddhist readers. At the core of this book is an insistent wisdom that death comes to everyone, and, contra the poet Philip Larkin, that, in fact, it is different whined at than withstood. Knowing how to die -- with grace, hope and good humor -- is essential to knowing how to live.
A look at the bright side; Happiness: A History by Darrin McMahon
Book Review; Features Desk
A look at the bright side; Happiness A History Darrin M. McMahon Atlantic Monthly: 544 pp., $27.50
Gordon Marino
Gordon Marino is a professor of philosophy and the director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College and editor of "Basic Writings of Existentialism."
1568 words
1 January 2006
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
R-3
English
Copyright 2006 The Los Angeles Times
"HERE'S wishing you much happiness in 2006," a kind friend recently wrote me in a holiday greeting card. Not to be a grouch, but what does that mean? As Americans, we have a religious devotion to the idea of our own happiness. We believe that we have a sacred right to pursue that strange bird into the forest of our lives and are even prepared to medicate any condition that gets in the way of the hunt.
Even my philosophy students lecture me that life is all about the pursuit of happiness. In return, I badger them with: "Aristotle insisted that in order to hit a target, you have to be able to find it. So how would you define happiness?" Usually, they shrug and use catchphrases about feeling good and doing what you want. Some even meekly suggest that the good life has something to do with being a good person. Truth be told, I am a bit of a depressive who, even at the best and most joyous of times, thinks "this too shall pass." Really, I am in no position to pronounce on happiness, but then there is Darrin M. McMahon's masterful meditation "Happiness: A History."
McMahon's book is a genealogy of the idea of happiness. Book-length studies like this are much in vogue today. Indeed, during the last decade, ancestries of abstractions such as boredom, anxiety and melancholy have been published and have sold exceptionally well -- for example, Jennifer Hecht's "Doubt: A History" and Patricia Spacks' "Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind." The reasonable presumption behind such books is that ideas, no less than frogs, evolve and are subject to the thunderclaps of contingency. Meanings are displaced and abraded in the mill of time. Books like McMahon's are aimed at restoring the sense of a term that may have been muted by seismic cultural shifts.
Deep in antiquity, McMahon argues, happiness was inextricably bound up with notions of luck and good fortune. Although the Greeks understood that virtue was a part of happiness, they also grasped that moral paragons often led miserable lives and, as McMahon puts it, "there is plenty of hap in happiness."
Equally important, in "the understanding of Herodotus and his contemporaries ... happiness is not a feeling, nor any subjective state.... Happiness, rather, is a characterization of an entire life." A popular adage among the Greeks was: "Call no man happy until he is dead." At the time, it was commonly understood that fortune was a carnival wheel and that even the mighty could be brought down as suddenly as a horse slipping on a stone. The ancients also believed that a good life could not end on the rack but must involve a good death.
McMahon explains that with the advent of Christianity, less weight was put on fortune -- happiness, however, was still largely regarded as a state lying beyond the borders of this vale of tears. During the Enlightenment, however, people came to believe that well-being could be achieved on Earth, and in our present age happiness is regarded by many as something between an entitlement and emolument for a job well done. Elsewhere, McMahon notes how the Buddha is often shown smiling even though one of his teachings is that all life is suffering -- not something to smile about!
This is a deeply philosophical book that quietly raises fundamental questions on the scale of: Is life worth living? At the same time, "Happiness: A History" is a scintillating course in the history of ideas that invites us to consider paintings, poetry, even the plaster mask of Beethoven. As he contemplates the changing representations of happiness from the halos of 14th century painter Giotto Biandolini to the smiley faces of the 1970s, McMahon charts perturbations in the concept as it relates to pleasure, pain and melancholy. Apropos of our own age of near-pandemic depression, it was, McMahon maintains, only when happiness began to emerge as a possibility in this life that the medical elite began to think of melancholy as a disease.
McMahon takes many side jaunts on his intellectual safari, but his text is grounded in a series of gracefully written commentaries on a cast of immortal excogitators including Aristotle, Augustine, Calvin, Luther, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Mill, Marx, Darwin and Freud. Of noteworthy percipience are McMahon's readings of Rousseau, whom the author credits with establishing some of the self-defeating snares of the happiness quest. In the commercial and industrial world of the West, our attempts to satisfy desires inevitably lead us to new forms of desire and, as a result, to fresh frustrations. In the end, McMahon captures Rousseau sighing in his "Reveries of a Solitary Walker":
"Happiness is a lasting state which does not seem to be made for man in this world. Everything here on earth is in continual flux which allows nothing to assume any constant form. All things change round about us, we ourselves change, and no one can be sure of loving tomorrow what he loves today. All our plans of happiness in this life are therefore empty dreams."
McMahon's book also contains illuminating pages on the history of happiness in Revolutionary-era America. In a gloss on the Declaration of Independence, McMahon unravels the tensions between the private and publicly oriented threads of the American vision of the good life. On the one hand, our forefathers closely associated happiness with property rights and the individual pursuit of pleasure. On the other, Jefferson insisted, "Happiness is the aim of life but virtue is the foundation of happiness," which McMahon maintains echoes "Franklin's observation that virtue and happiness were mother and daughter."
There is a pacific tone to this work, sometimes tinged with irony. In his encounters with the likes of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, McMahon seems to wince at operatic acts of theory. As a historian, he delves into issues that are at the heart of the matter of life with an almost remote air.
And yet McMahon's personal convictions ring through in the coda. There he intimates that Americans have been bamboozled, perhaps by the Aristotles of the advertising world, into thinking of happiness as an elusive kind of emotional state that can be secured by getting and following the right set of directions. If I just had this house, or that job, or a pile of money, or peace in my family, I would be happy -- thus turn the minds of people who haunt themselves with fantasies of the perfect life. McMahon even worries that we might become so frustrated in our search for this grail that we will meddle with genes and turn human nature upside down.
In the end, however, although he feigns raising an eyebrow, McMahon seems convinced by recent studies indicating that we are each endowed with a kind of emotional set point. According to this view, most humans are existentially unflappable. Whether it be winning the lottery or losing our jobs, after an initial reaction we settle back down into the same old repertoire of moods. As the scientists of happiness have it, we are both amazingly resilient against tragedy and remarkably resistant to radically positive change. In a footnote, McMahon concedes that depression stands as an exception to this rule -- and quite an exception it is, because, according to an article cited in "Happiness," millions of people are on antidepressants. I have had my boat rocked a few times in life and I have watched a few others go over the falls, and my experience roils against the view that, emotionally speaking, nothing ever really changes, or at least not for long.
After 500-plus pages, McMahon concludes that there is something to be said for and against almost every one of the umpteen theories he has rehearsed. Ultimately, he writes, we are not any closer to solving the puzzle of happiness than we were at the beginning. But then, with a wink and a nod, he assures us that the results of his research reveal that the important thing in life is the process as well as the result -- the same could be said of this superb book. *
*
From Happiness: A History
THE smiley face captured perfectly the will to good feeling that has continued to propel us forward to the present day. That this symbol was created by an advertising agent -- offered, almost, as a gift -- is all the more fitting. For few figures in contemporary Western society play as central a role in perpetuating the prospect of perpetual pleasure. If advertising can be said to be the business of selling dreams, the dream now is often a variation on the theme of happiness -- at all times, in all places, in all things. Have a Coke and a smile. Indulge in "happy hour," savor "genuine satisfaction." Or spend a weekend, as the national branding campaign of Aruba tempts, on "happiness island," the island "where happiness lives."
A look at the bright side; Happiness A History Darrin M. McMahon Atlantic Monthly: 544 pp., $27.50
Gordon Marino
Gordon Marino is a professor of philosophy and the director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College and editor of "Basic Writings of Existentialism."
1568 words
1 January 2006
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
R-3
English
Copyright 2006 The Los Angeles Times
"HERE'S wishing you much happiness in 2006," a kind friend recently wrote me in a holiday greeting card. Not to be a grouch, but what does that mean? As Americans, we have a religious devotion to the idea of our own happiness. We believe that we have a sacred right to pursue that strange bird into the forest of our lives and are even prepared to medicate any condition that gets in the way of the hunt.
Even my philosophy students lecture me that life is all about the pursuit of happiness. In return, I badger them with: "Aristotle insisted that in order to hit a target, you have to be able to find it. So how would you define happiness?" Usually, they shrug and use catchphrases about feeling good and doing what you want. Some even meekly suggest that the good life has something to do with being a good person. Truth be told, I am a bit of a depressive who, even at the best and most joyous of times, thinks "this too shall pass." Really, I am in no position to pronounce on happiness, but then there is Darrin M. McMahon's masterful meditation "Happiness: A History."
McMahon's book is a genealogy of the idea of happiness. Book-length studies like this are much in vogue today. Indeed, during the last decade, ancestries of abstractions such as boredom, anxiety and melancholy have been published and have sold exceptionally well -- for example, Jennifer Hecht's "Doubt: A History" and Patricia Spacks' "Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind." The reasonable presumption behind such books is that ideas, no less than frogs, evolve and are subject to the thunderclaps of contingency. Meanings are displaced and abraded in the mill of time. Books like McMahon's are aimed at restoring the sense of a term that may have been muted by seismic cultural shifts.
Deep in antiquity, McMahon argues, happiness was inextricably bound up with notions of luck and good fortune. Although the Greeks understood that virtue was a part of happiness, they also grasped that moral paragons often led miserable lives and, as McMahon puts it, "there is plenty of hap in happiness."
Equally important, in "the understanding of Herodotus and his contemporaries ... happiness is not a feeling, nor any subjective state.... Happiness, rather, is a characterization of an entire life." A popular adage among the Greeks was: "Call no man happy until he is dead." At the time, it was commonly understood that fortune was a carnival wheel and that even the mighty could be brought down as suddenly as a horse slipping on a stone. The ancients also believed that a good life could not end on the rack but must involve a good death.
McMahon explains that with the advent of Christianity, less weight was put on fortune -- happiness, however, was still largely regarded as a state lying beyond the borders of this vale of tears. During the Enlightenment, however, people came to believe that well-being could be achieved on Earth, and in our present age happiness is regarded by many as something between an entitlement and emolument for a job well done. Elsewhere, McMahon notes how the Buddha is often shown smiling even though one of his teachings is that all life is suffering -- not something to smile about!
This is a deeply philosophical book that quietly raises fundamental questions on the scale of: Is life worth living? At the same time, "Happiness: A History" is a scintillating course in the history of ideas that invites us to consider paintings, poetry, even the plaster mask of Beethoven. As he contemplates the changing representations of happiness from the halos of 14th century painter Giotto Biandolini to the smiley faces of the 1970s, McMahon charts perturbations in the concept as it relates to pleasure, pain and melancholy. Apropos of our own age of near-pandemic depression, it was, McMahon maintains, only when happiness began to emerge as a possibility in this life that the medical elite began to think of melancholy as a disease.
McMahon takes many side jaunts on his intellectual safari, but his text is grounded in a series of gracefully written commentaries on a cast of immortal excogitators including Aristotle, Augustine, Calvin, Luther, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Mill, Marx, Darwin and Freud. Of noteworthy percipience are McMahon's readings of Rousseau, whom the author credits with establishing some of the self-defeating snares of the happiness quest. In the commercial and industrial world of the West, our attempts to satisfy desires inevitably lead us to new forms of desire and, as a result, to fresh frustrations. In the end, McMahon captures Rousseau sighing in his "Reveries of a Solitary Walker":
"Happiness is a lasting state which does not seem to be made for man in this world. Everything here on earth is in continual flux which allows nothing to assume any constant form. All things change round about us, we ourselves change, and no one can be sure of loving tomorrow what he loves today. All our plans of happiness in this life are therefore empty dreams."
McMahon's book also contains illuminating pages on the history of happiness in Revolutionary-era America. In a gloss on the Declaration of Independence, McMahon unravels the tensions between the private and publicly oriented threads of the American vision of the good life. On the one hand, our forefathers closely associated happiness with property rights and the individual pursuit of pleasure. On the other, Jefferson insisted, "Happiness is the aim of life but virtue is the foundation of happiness," which McMahon maintains echoes "Franklin's observation that virtue and happiness were mother and daughter."
There is a pacific tone to this work, sometimes tinged with irony. In his encounters with the likes of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, McMahon seems to wince at operatic acts of theory. As a historian, he delves into issues that are at the heart of the matter of life with an almost remote air.
And yet McMahon's personal convictions ring through in the coda. There he intimates that Americans have been bamboozled, perhaps by the Aristotles of the advertising world, into thinking of happiness as an elusive kind of emotional state that can be secured by getting and following the right set of directions. If I just had this house, or that job, or a pile of money, or peace in my family, I would be happy -- thus turn the minds of people who haunt themselves with fantasies of the perfect life. McMahon even worries that we might become so frustrated in our search for this grail that we will meddle with genes and turn human nature upside down.
In the end, however, although he feigns raising an eyebrow, McMahon seems convinced by recent studies indicating that we are each endowed with a kind of emotional set point. According to this view, most humans are existentially unflappable. Whether it be winning the lottery or losing our jobs, after an initial reaction we settle back down into the same old repertoire of moods. As the scientists of happiness have it, we are both amazingly resilient against tragedy and remarkably resistant to radically positive change. In a footnote, McMahon concedes that depression stands as an exception to this rule -- and quite an exception it is, because, according to an article cited in "Happiness," millions of people are on antidepressants. I have had my boat rocked a few times in life and I have watched a few others go over the falls, and my experience roils against the view that, emotionally speaking, nothing ever really changes, or at least not for long.
After 500-plus pages, McMahon concludes that there is something to be said for and against almost every one of the umpteen theories he has rehearsed. Ultimately, he writes, we are not any closer to solving the puzzle of happiness than we were at the beginning. But then, with a wink and a nod, he assures us that the results of his research reveal that the important thing in life is the process as well as the result -- the same could be said of this superb book. *
*
From Happiness: A History
THE smiley face captured perfectly the will to good feeling that has continued to propel us forward to the present day. That this symbol was created by an advertising agent -- offered, almost, as a gift -- is all the more fitting. For few figures in contemporary Western society play as central a role in perpetuating the prospect of perpetual pleasure. If advertising can be said to be the business of selling dreams, the dream now is often a variation on the theme of happiness -- at all times, in all places, in all things. Have a Coke and a smile. Indulge in "happy hour," savor "genuine satisfaction." Or spend a weekend, as the national branding campaign of Aruba tempts, on "happiness island," the island "where happiness lives."
The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha By Stephen T. Asma HarperSanFrancisco
PHILOSOPHER ON THE ROAD TO THE HEART OF THINGS BUDDHIST
Clare Innes, Globe Correspondent
848 words
18 December 2005
The Boston Globe
THIRD
M2
English
© 2005 New York Times Company. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.
"Doctor Who" meets "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" in this lively and unholy pilgrimage through Cambodia. Stephen T. Asma was a thirtysomething professor of philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities at Columbia College in Chicago when in 2003 he was invited to teach a graduate seminar to Cambodian students at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh. In "The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha," Asma takes us through this bewildering, war-torn country in search of traces of the oldest form of Buddhism, known as Theravada. Fueled with spirited fascination and wry wit, he takes us to locations that illuminate Buddhism and the culture that nursed it into being. No stranger to the purest forms of reverence, his moving description of meeting the Venerable Maha Ghosananda, the holiest man in Cambodia, will make your fingertips tingle.
Along the way, Asma navigates a choppy emotional sea at the infamous Killing Fields from the Pol Pot regime. At another historical hot spot, he contemplates the street corner where, in 1963, the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc sat in seeming placid meditation as he immolated himself, a scene seared into the memory of anyone who has seen the famous newspaper photograph. We accompany Asma and some friends on an alcohol-soaked visitation to a back-alley massage parlor. Fear not: Our hero (whose pregnant wife awaits him back in Chicago) submits only to a massage, but we get to ride around inside his head as he watches his pals, one by one, disappear behind the curtains in these dark, slightly ominous little places. Asma uses the experience to probe the labyrinthine rationales of the sex industry, its existence as the best and worst of how women survive in a society where men demonize women for causing their own cravings, and the loopholes of Buddhism where, technically, "activities and life choices are always weighed pragmatically as to whether they contribute to or detract from dukka [suffering], and the answer to that evaluation largely depends on who is asking." No wonder the gods drink whiskey. Intoxicants are on the blacklist for Buddhists, however, and Asma savors one of the paradoxes that lies at the heart of Buddhism in Cambodia. Animistic Brahmanism flavors Buddhism with a belief in troublemaking spirits that inhabit buildings, trees, roads, and so on. Travel anywhere in Cambodia and you will see little spirit houses built in hopes of enticing the spirits to live there, rather than on farms, in businesses or homes, or even Buddhist temples, where it is believed they cause misfortune. Typical offerings include incense, flowers, and precious trinkets. But if you really want to get on the good side of these spirits, you leave them a shot of whiskey. Asma goes on to survey Buddhist temples containing the purported tooth and eyebrow of the Buddha, whose cremated remains were scattered throughout Asia. Twelve of these 2,500-year- old relics have been gathered for permanent exhibit at the United Nations headquarters in New York. They can be seen on Vesak Day, the holiest in the Buddhist calendar, commemorating the day of the Buddha's enlightenment, which falls on the full moon in May. Asma, author of "Buddha for Beginners" (1996) and "Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums" (2003), sharply details his distaste for what he calls "California Buddhism," a "neutered" form of Zen Buddhism that many Westerners who consider themselves practicing Buddhists embrace without comprehending its most basic underpinnings. "Often the stuff that passes for 'Eastern' in the West would be unrecognized in the East," he writes. "Eastern ideas in the West float about like little self-esteem life-preservers." He explores the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence at a site where monstrous banyan trees spill over the crumbling temples of Ta Phrom "at glacial speed, over the tops of the temple walls, wrapping around pillars, and pouring into the nooks and crannies between the bricks. Teratological rhizomorphic tentacles grow over the ruins. ... Green creeping vines bubble out of every crevice and embrace the collapsing sandstone architecture." In the end, Asma finds a "transcendental everydayness" that helps guide modern-day Buddhists and lends him a resonance of his own. "The atmosphere is so thick with unfamiliarity that I couldn't help but be rapt in infantlike wonder all the time," he writes of daily life in Cambodia. As he sits in a streetside cafe, "an elephant lumbered by slowly, and a man with no legs or lower torso rolled up on a cart and took my shoes off for shining, and a snack plate of barbecued insects appeared on the table - and then the streets might literally flood in minutes with monsoon rains. I had to practice mindfulness by necessity."
BOOK REVIEW The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha By Stephen T. Asma HarperSanFrancisco, 272 pp., $24.95 Contact Clare Innes, a freelance writer in Vermont, at cinnes@wwnorton.com.
Clare Innes, Globe Correspondent
848 words
18 December 2005
The Boston Globe
THIRD
M2
English
© 2005 New York Times Company. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.
"Doctor Who" meets "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" in this lively and unholy pilgrimage through Cambodia. Stephen T. Asma was a thirtysomething professor of philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities at Columbia College in Chicago when in 2003 he was invited to teach a graduate seminar to Cambodian students at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh. In "The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha," Asma takes us through this bewildering, war-torn country in search of traces of the oldest form of Buddhism, known as Theravada. Fueled with spirited fascination and wry wit, he takes us to locations that illuminate Buddhism and the culture that nursed it into being. No stranger to the purest forms of reverence, his moving description of meeting the Venerable Maha Ghosananda, the holiest man in Cambodia, will make your fingertips tingle.
Along the way, Asma navigates a choppy emotional sea at the infamous Killing Fields from the Pol Pot regime. At another historical hot spot, he contemplates the street corner where, in 1963, the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc sat in seeming placid meditation as he immolated himself, a scene seared into the memory of anyone who has seen the famous newspaper photograph. We accompany Asma and some friends on an alcohol-soaked visitation to a back-alley massage parlor. Fear not: Our hero (whose pregnant wife awaits him back in Chicago) submits only to a massage, but we get to ride around inside his head as he watches his pals, one by one, disappear behind the curtains in these dark, slightly ominous little places. Asma uses the experience to probe the labyrinthine rationales of the sex industry, its existence as the best and worst of how women survive in a society where men demonize women for causing their own cravings, and the loopholes of Buddhism where, technically, "activities and life choices are always weighed pragmatically as to whether they contribute to or detract from dukka [suffering], and the answer to that evaluation largely depends on who is asking." No wonder the gods drink whiskey. Intoxicants are on the blacklist for Buddhists, however, and Asma savors one of the paradoxes that lies at the heart of Buddhism in Cambodia. Animistic Brahmanism flavors Buddhism with a belief in troublemaking spirits that inhabit buildings, trees, roads, and so on. Travel anywhere in Cambodia and you will see little spirit houses built in hopes of enticing the spirits to live there, rather than on farms, in businesses or homes, or even Buddhist temples, where it is believed they cause misfortune. Typical offerings include incense, flowers, and precious trinkets. But if you really want to get on the good side of these spirits, you leave them a shot of whiskey. Asma goes on to survey Buddhist temples containing the purported tooth and eyebrow of the Buddha, whose cremated remains were scattered throughout Asia. Twelve of these 2,500-year- old relics have been gathered for permanent exhibit at the United Nations headquarters in New York. They can be seen on Vesak Day, the holiest in the Buddhist calendar, commemorating the day of the Buddha's enlightenment, which falls on the full moon in May. Asma, author of "Buddha for Beginners" (1996) and "Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums" (2003), sharply details his distaste for what he calls "California Buddhism," a "neutered" form of Zen Buddhism that many Westerners who consider themselves practicing Buddhists embrace without comprehending its most basic underpinnings. "Often the stuff that passes for 'Eastern' in the West would be unrecognized in the East," he writes. "Eastern ideas in the West float about like little self-esteem life-preservers." He explores the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence at a site where monstrous banyan trees spill over the crumbling temples of Ta Phrom "at glacial speed, over the tops of the temple walls, wrapping around pillars, and pouring into the nooks and crannies between the bricks. Teratological rhizomorphic tentacles grow over the ruins. ... Green creeping vines bubble out of every crevice and embrace the collapsing sandstone architecture." In the end, Asma finds a "transcendental everydayness" that helps guide modern-day Buddhists and lends him a resonance of his own. "The atmosphere is so thick with unfamiliarity that I couldn't help but be rapt in infantlike wonder all the time," he writes of daily life in Cambodia. As he sits in a streetside cafe, "an elephant lumbered by slowly, and a man with no legs or lower torso rolled up on a cart and took my shoes off for shining, and a snack plate of barbecued insects appeared on the table - and then the streets might literally flood in minutes with monsoon rains. I had to practice mindfulness by necessity."
BOOK REVIEW The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha By Stephen T. Asma HarperSanFrancisco, 272 pp., $24.95 Contact Clare Innes, a freelance writer in Vermont, at cinnes@wwnorton.com.
Buddha (comics) Vol.1-8 by Osamu Tezuka
Buddha (Volumes 1-8).(Brief Article)(Book Review)
Gilson, Dave
86 words
1 December 2005
Mother Jones
73
ISSN: 0362-8841; Volume 30; Issue 7
English
Copyright 2005 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved.
Buddha (Volumes 1-8) By Osamu Tezuka.
Finally available in English, this 3,000-page masterpiece by the godfather of Japanese comic books isn't Siddhartha with speech bubbles, but a high-spirited, elaborately scripted melodrama starring a nonviolent superhero who takes the occasional meditative pause. And at 25 bucks per beautifully packaged volume, Buddha--like its namesake--will challenge you to curb your desire for worldly goods.--D.G.
Gilson, Dave
86 words
1 December 2005
Mother Jones
73
ISSN: 0362-8841; Volume 30; Issue 7
English
Copyright 2005 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved.
Buddha (Volumes 1-8) By Osamu Tezuka.
Finally available in English, this 3,000-page masterpiece by the godfather of Japanese comic books isn't Siddhartha with speech bubbles, but a high-spirited, elaborately scripted melodrama starring a nonviolent superhero who takes the occasional meditative pause. And at 25 bucks per beautifully packaged volume, Buddha--like its namesake--will challenge you to curb your desire for worldly goods.--D.G.
Why we want what we want by William B. Irvine
Book Review Desk; SECT7
I Am, Therefore I Want
By Kathryn Harrison
1238 words
6 November 2005
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
22
English
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
ON DESIRE
Why We Want What We Want. By William B. Irvine.
322 pp. Oxford University Press. $24.
''There are two tragedies in life,'' George Bernard Shaw wrote. ''One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.''
''Why We Want What We Want,'' the subtitle of William B. Irvine's book, dangles the possibility that it is his ambition to let readers glimpse the hidden workings of their hearts. But ''On Desire'' is a far less romantic exploration than its jacket implies, with its flowers and tormented, downcast faces. In fact, an accurate description of the book's contents would be ''How Not to Want What We Want,'' but of course that could scare off all but the determined ascetic.
As every sentient being knows, desire can cause problems. Enslaved to our wants, for food, shelter, love, comfort, community, status -- the list is endless -- so are we saved by having them. Anyone who has suffered a serious depression can attest that desire is as vital a sign of life as a heartbeat. Lacking desire we are psychically dead, our bodies in imminent danger of following our souls.
A professor of philosophy at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, Irvine has taught courses on the nature of desire and here presents the topic as if to a reasonably intelligent undergraduate, presuming the reader's ignorance as well as his literacy. He organizes ''On Desire'' into three parts, a program of illumination whose goal is to help the reader ''master desire.'' That human life depends on desire, or is at the least inseparable from it, Irvine does not dispute, but his purpose is not to glorify this essence that artists celebrate.
Part 1 exposes ''the secret life of desire'': how we experience our wants, from those for basic animal requirements, like food, to abstract goals -- the esteem of our fellows, for example -- that may feel as necessary as food to complicated creatures who cannot live by bread alone. Desire cannot by definition be satisfied. To answer one desire only allows us to pay attention to the next, and beyond gaining what our bodies strictly need, what we want is usually based on our assessment of how others perceive what we already have. Because we are social animals, we depend on constant confirmation of self, whether in terms of admiration or of envy, fear, even hatred.
For this reason, every object of desire has a ''positional'' as well as an absolute value. The car you loved as you pulled into the parking lot at work loses its charm when you see the more expensive machine driven by a rival. And yet you're lucky if what you want, you can, with effort, get. Failures of desire, rightly called crises by Irvine, are not only painful but also potentially dangerous. Losing the ability to desire is the sine qua non of serious depression. But to retain desire without finding meaning in satisfying it -- what Tolstoy called an ''arrest of life'' -- portends a profound existential collapse that can also presage suicide. Still painful, if not as dire, is to feel disgust with the desires you have, as did Siddhartha Gautama when he understood the limitless suffering of man and began his journey toward enlightenment.
But before we can ''defeat the enemy,'' Irvine declares, ''we need to understand the enemy.'' Advances in evolutionary psychology and neurochemistry require the student of philosophy to reconcile classical views on desire with what Irvine calls the ''science of desire.'' In order to desire, a creature must be able to experience good and bad feelings and then remember these feelings and what inspired them. Evolutionary psychologists assume that these capacities -- to feel, to recall feeling and to desire -- developed in concert because desire depends on the consciousness that one thing is more, well, desirable than another.
There are two basic kinds of desire. A ''terminal'' desire is an end in itself; an ''instrumental'' desire is one conceived in service to another desire. Often produced in long sequences intended to further a vague or unattainable goal, instrumental desires represent a ''vast majority'' of those we entertain. Imagine how many instrumental desires might be engendered by having fame as a terminal desire. The person seeking fame as, say, a vocalist, would desire to sing well, which would cause him to desire to take voice lessons, to find the best teacher, to get a better-paying job so he could afford to pay the best teacher's fee, to rewrite his resume to get that job, to buy a new suit for a job interview and so forth. Beyond this, chains of desire often interlock, as when the desire for fame is connected with the desire to seduce beautiful women, another terminal desire that may inspire its own chains of instrumental ones.
To complicate our insatiability further, our brains have ''desire-generating systems,'' a dominant verbal system that produces ''rational'' (instrumental) desires and -- perhaps more important -- rationalizes those desires that arise from other, unconscious systems. These systems represent what we used to think of, quaintly, as the id, that neurochemical ghost insistently demanding steak au poivre, shopping sprees, shoplifting sprees, adulterous liaisons, any and all of which hankerings are nimbly enabled by an articulate mechanism that evolved to protect our species from the kind of internal conflict that would trip up a thriving, procreating and surviving fittest.
In fact, our adaptive nature, which has ensured our survival, may help explain our eternal dissatisfaction. Soon used to the very things we once craved, we take them for granted, and their desirability wears off.
How can we bear up under the relentlessness of our desire? On to the quixotic subject of ''dealing with our desires.'' In order to satisfy a desire, we must make it our goal and then work to achieve it -- but if the goal is transcending desire entirely, this strategy is of no use. Desiring to not desire, after all, is itself a new form of desire. Further, tampering with our ''B.I.S.,'' or biological incentive system -- the tangle of dendrites and neurochemicals that rewards us with good feelings when we gratify our desires -- is worse than useless. One after another experiment has shown that the exclusively rational man is incapable of any action whatsoever. Emotions, which might seem to inhibit our ability to use reason, are necessary to make decisions. Without them, we remove motivation, even so basic a one as to get out of the way of oncoming traffic.
Really, the only hope of managing -- not conquering -- desire is consciousness. A compressed survey of the various religious and philosophical mechanisms humans have created in their attempt to master desire shows that they all come down to our painstakingly achieving greater levels of consciousness. The ''middle path'' between hedonism and asceticism that Buddha advised, the prayers of the Jew or Christian, the temperance of the Muslim, the reasoning that underpins all philosophies: these aim not to extinguish desire but to arrive at a state of mindfulness that allows us to alter our relationship to our desires, and thus achieve tranquillity. Fortunately for all the writers whose greatest desire is to comment on desire, there's not much chance of our succeeding.
I Am, Therefore I Want
By Kathryn Harrison
1238 words
6 November 2005
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
22
English
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
ON DESIRE
Why We Want What We Want. By William B. Irvine.
322 pp. Oxford University Press. $24.
''There are two tragedies in life,'' George Bernard Shaw wrote. ''One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.''
''Why We Want What We Want,'' the subtitle of William B. Irvine's book, dangles the possibility that it is his ambition to let readers glimpse the hidden workings of their hearts. But ''On Desire'' is a far less romantic exploration than its jacket implies, with its flowers and tormented, downcast faces. In fact, an accurate description of the book's contents would be ''How Not to Want What We Want,'' but of course that could scare off all but the determined ascetic.
As every sentient being knows, desire can cause problems. Enslaved to our wants, for food, shelter, love, comfort, community, status -- the list is endless -- so are we saved by having them. Anyone who has suffered a serious depression can attest that desire is as vital a sign of life as a heartbeat. Lacking desire we are psychically dead, our bodies in imminent danger of following our souls.
A professor of philosophy at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, Irvine has taught courses on the nature of desire and here presents the topic as if to a reasonably intelligent undergraduate, presuming the reader's ignorance as well as his literacy. He organizes ''On Desire'' into three parts, a program of illumination whose goal is to help the reader ''master desire.'' That human life depends on desire, or is at the least inseparable from it, Irvine does not dispute, but his purpose is not to glorify this essence that artists celebrate.
Part 1 exposes ''the secret life of desire'': how we experience our wants, from those for basic animal requirements, like food, to abstract goals -- the esteem of our fellows, for example -- that may feel as necessary as food to complicated creatures who cannot live by bread alone. Desire cannot by definition be satisfied. To answer one desire only allows us to pay attention to the next, and beyond gaining what our bodies strictly need, what we want is usually based on our assessment of how others perceive what we already have. Because we are social animals, we depend on constant confirmation of self, whether in terms of admiration or of envy, fear, even hatred.
For this reason, every object of desire has a ''positional'' as well as an absolute value. The car you loved as you pulled into the parking lot at work loses its charm when you see the more expensive machine driven by a rival. And yet you're lucky if what you want, you can, with effort, get. Failures of desire, rightly called crises by Irvine, are not only painful but also potentially dangerous. Losing the ability to desire is the sine qua non of serious depression. But to retain desire without finding meaning in satisfying it -- what Tolstoy called an ''arrest of life'' -- portends a profound existential collapse that can also presage suicide. Still painful, if not as dire, is to feel disgust with the desires you have, as did Siddhartha Gautama when he understood the limitless suffering of man and began his journey toward enlightenment.
But before we can ''defeat the enemy,'' Irvine declares, ''we need to understand the enemy.'' Advances in evolutionary psychology and neurochemistry require the student of philosophy to reconcile classical views on desire with what Irvine calls the ''science of desire.'' In order to desire, a creature must be able to experience good and bad feelings and then remember these feelings and what inspired them. Evolutionary psychologists assume that these capacities -- to feel, to recall feeling and to desire -- developed in concert because desire depends on the consciousness that one thing is more, well, desirable than another.
There are two basic kinds of desire. A ''terminal'' desire is an end in itself; an ''instrumental'' desire is one conceived in service to another desire. Often produced in long sequences intended to further a vague or unattainable goal, instrumental desires represent a ''vast majority'' of those we entertain. Imagine how many instrumental desires might be engendered by having fame as a terminal desire. The person seeking fame as, say, a vocalist, would desire to sing well, which would cause him to desire to take voice lessons, to find the best teacher, to get a better-paying job so he could afford to pay the best teacher's fee, to rewrite his resume to get that job, to buy a new suit for a job interview and so forth. Beyond this, chains of desire often interlock, as when the desire for fame is connected with the desire to seduce beautiful women, another terminal desire that may inspire its own chains of instrumental ones.
To complicate our insatiability further, our brains have ''desire-generating systems,'' a dominant verbal system that produces ''rational'' (instrumental) desires and -- perhaps more important -- rationalizes those desires that arise from other, unconscious systems. These systems represent what we used to think of, quaintly, as the id, that neurochemical ghost insistently demanding steak au poivre, shopping sprees, shoplifting sprees, adulterous liaisons, any and all of which hankerings are nimbly enabled by an articulate mechanism that evolved to protect our species from the kind of internal conflict that would trip up a thriving, procreating and surviving fittest.
In fact, our adaptive nature, which has ensured our survival, may help explain our eternal dissatisfaction. Soon used to the very things we once craved, we take them for granted, and their desirability wears off.
How can we bear up under the relentlessness of our desire? On to the quixotic subject of ''dealing with our desires.'' In order to satisfy a desire, we must make it our goal and then work to achieve it -- but if the goal is transcending desire entirely, this strategy is of no use. Desiring to not desire, after all, is itself a new form of desire. Further, tampering with our ''B.I.S.,'' or biological incentive system -- the tangle of dendrites and neurochemicals that rewards us with good feelings when we gratify our desires -- is worse than useless. One after another experiment has shown that the exclusively rational man is incapable of any action whatsoever. Emotions, which might seem to inhibit our ability to use reason, are necessary to make decisions. Without them, we remove motivation, even so basic a one as to get out of the way of oncoming traffic.
Really, the only hope of managing -- not conquering -- desire is consciousness. A compressed survey of the various religious and philosophical mechanisms humans have created in their attempt to master desire shows that they all come down to our painstakingly achieving greater levels of consciousness. The ''middle path'' between hedonism and asceticism that Buddha advised, the prayers of the Jew or Christian, the temperance of the Muslim, the reasoning that underpins all philosophies: these aim not to extinguish desire but to arrive at a state of mindfulness that allows us to alter our relationship to our desires, and thus achieve tranquillity. Fortunately for all the writers whose greatest desire is to comment on desire, there's not much chance of our succeeding.
Bayon: New Perspectives by Joyce Clark (ed.)
BOOK REVIEW; Befuddled by the Bayon
1361 words
1 September 2007
Bangkok Post
O3
English
(c) 2007
New research on later Angkor spreads both light and darkness
CHRIS BAKER
BAYON: New Perspectives, Edited by Joyce Clark, River Books (2007), 256pp, 2,245 baht, ISBN 978-9-74-986347-3 : For many visitors to Angkor, the Bayon is the most powerful and perplexing experience. The grandeur of Angkor Wat is easier to grasp and admire, but the sheer eccentricity of the Bayon's design is unnerving. The muddle of war scenes, religious images and homely vignettes of everyday life in the galleries is baffling. The site itself is a maze. And the faces redefine enigma.
Among scholars, the befuddlement is worse. Long after other Angkor monuments were rediscovered, the Bayon was still lost in the trees. Estimated dating of the monument shifted about once a decade. Attempts to interpret its meaning provoked bitter controversy.
With peace in Cambodia, scholars returned to Angkor after a long break, equipped with new theories, new technology and big research grants. The old monopoly of the French School no longer holds sway. This book is a first result of this new era. The title could have been Jayavarman VII Reassessed, or New Perspectives on Later Angkor, but the book focuses on the Bayon, perhaps because it is the most extraordinary "document" of its time. But how to read the damned thing?
The conventional story before the interlude in Khmer scholarship went like this. The Bayon was built by Jayavarman VII in the late twelfth century. Angkor at the time was engaged in constant conflict with the Cham, as attested by the war scenes in the Bayon galleries. Although initially interpreted as Hindu, the monument was revealed as Buddhist. The extraordinary faces, locally identified as "Phrom", probably represent Brahma, but the version incorporated into Buddhism rather than a Hindu original. After Jayavarman VII's death, there was a Hindu reaction in which much of the Bayon's statuary was defaced or destroyed. These conflicts of religion and ethnicity somehow contributed to the decline of Angkor, but nobody was quite sure how.
Claude Jacques and Anne-Valerie Schweyer repaint the picture of a simple Khmer vs Cham hostility. Jayavarman VII spent 15 years of his early manhood in the Cham country and maintained strong political connections there. The scenes in the galleries show mixed groups of Cham and Khmer fighting one another, rather than a simple ethnic divide. Jayavarman VII had ambitions to unite the Khmer and Cham, but this ambition seems to have crumbled amid complex factional quarrels.
Religious conflict is also less stark. Hiram Woodward and T. S. Maxwell dispose of the idea of a black-white rivalry between Hindu and Buddhist camps. When the Indian gods came to Southeast Asia they were given new meanings. Siva, Vishnu and Buddha tend to be pictured together rather than apart. Jayavarman VII certainly embraced Buddhism more warmly than his predecessors, but he did not exclude Siva and Vishnu. Moreover, Maxwell finds another fascinating process at work in the Bayon. The corridors and galleries were originally studded with images, installed by individuals and villages, perhaps to honour their ancestors. These images were given Sanskrit names, but these names cannot be found in religious texts. Probably they are translations of Khmer originals. Maxwell thinks the Bayon was an amazing site of the assimilation between Indic gods and local spirits which took place throughout Southeast Asia.
But who are the massive faces staring down from the great towers, and what do they mean? As no document has been found to answer this question, controversy has been provoked to run riot. Peter Sharrock stokes that controversy. He trawls through all the many candidates offered by previous scholars - Buddha, Lokesvara, Buddharaja, the king himself, a local guardian spirit, Brahma - and rejects all of them. He notes that the striking feature of these faces is the open eyes staring straight ahead. Previous images of the Buddha, Bodhisattvas or the king had eyes closed or lowered. The only analogous images of a Buddhist figure staring so powerfully in all directions, Sharrock claims, are in Nepal. Those originals may date to the same era as the Bayon - a time when Buddhism was being driven out of its Indian place-of-origin by Muslim invaders. In this crisis, Sharrock suggests, Buddhist kings in Nepal and Cambodia were drawn to an image of the Buddha which exuded the power of tantrism. Sharrock suggests the faces are Vajrasattva, a form emerging from tantric meditation. He points to other contemporary examples found at Angkor and Banteay Chamar.
In the longest and most intricate chapter in the book, Olivier Cunin traces the sequence of constructing the Bayon, complete with some extraordinary computer-generated simulations. He argues there were originally several other face-towers, including four on the corners of the outer wall. The monument was not built over a previous building but on a greenfield site. The central shrine on the upper level was constructed first, probably with the original Buddha image already inside. The inner terrace was also built early, within the reign of Jayavarman VII, scotching speculation that its Hindu bas-reliefs may be dated later. A magnetic technique shows that the stone came from seven different quarries, and allows Cunin to map a probable sequence of construction in some detail.
In another exhaustive chapter, Vittorio Roveda catalogues all the scenes carved in the inner gallery, outer gallery and the bases of the towers. He agrees with Groslier that the outer gallery is a personal biography of Jayavarman VII, but disagrees greatly on the detail. Most dramatically, Roveda suggests that the famous scene of a naval battle actually records a festival on the Tonle Sap. Why else would the scene by surrounded by homely vignettes of everyday life? In the inner gallery, he emphasizes the variety of Hindu religious imagery - classic versions of Siva and Vishnu and scenes from the Jataka, Ramayana and Mahabharata.
Claude Jacques trawls through the epigraphy, looking both backwards and forwards from Jayavarman VII's reign. The king's parentage was a mixture of Buddhist and Hindu. Jacques surmises that much of the Bayon was built after his reign.
These new research reports are fascinating but confusing. In an invaluable introduction, Michael Vickery helps to place them in perspective. He elegantly recapitulates the story of the Bayon's discovery and its vexed interpretation. He warns the reader that the contributors to this book are far from a team. On the one hand there are "idealists" who read the great religious texts and find an idea which they believe helps to explain the monument. On the other hand there are "materialists" who swarm over the stone blocks and try to conjure some meaning out of the physical object. Vickery quietly regrets there is nobody able to use the inscriptions and the physical evidence to impose some sense and some discipline on the use of text-based ideas.
This book is a huge stride away from the old simplicities about empire, ethnicity and religious conflict - ideas which fascinated the middle and late twentieth century. The Bayon era can no longer be pictured as the root of some cataclysmic downfall. Vickery and Jacques argue convincingly against the contention that Jayavarman VII's death led to an almost immediate Shaivite reaction and abandonment of the capital soon after. They suggest that Angkor remained occupied and important for another couple of centuries. There was certainly some religious conflict, carried out with rival chisels, but we are a long way from understanding it.
This book is a marvellous and stimulating collection of new scholarship which will fascinate anyone drawn to Angkor. But, like all pioneering scholarship, it raises more questions than it answers. What lies behind the extraordinary novelty and uniqueness of the Bayon? What prompted such an eccentric design? What is the meaning of the everyday scenes in the galleries - a question even more intriguing following Roveda's reinterpretation of the naval battle scene. What is the significance of the images which Maxwell suspects were placed by nobles and villagers throughout the maze of corridors? In short, do we understand anything more about Cambodian society and mentality in the Bayon era?
1361 words
1 September 2007
Bangkok Post
O3
English
(c) 2007
New research on later Angkor spreads both light and darkness
CHRIS BAKER
BAYON: New Perspectives, Edited by Joyce Clark, River Books (2007), 256pp, 2,245 baht, ISBN 978-9-74-986347-3 : For many visitors to Angkor, the Bayon is the most powerful and perplexing experience. The grandeur of Angkor Wat is easier to grasp and admire, but the sheer eccentricity of the Bayon's design is unnerving. The muddle of war scenes, religious images and homely vignettes of everyday life in the galleries is baffling. The site itself is a maze. And the faces redefine enigma.
Among scholars, the befuddlement is worse. Long after other Angkor monuments were rediscovered, the Bayon was still lost in the trees. Estimated dating of the monument shifted about once a decade. Attempts to interpret its meaning provoked bitter controversy.
With peace in Cambodia, scholars returned to Angkor after a long break, equipped with new theories, new technology and big research grants. The old monopoly of the French School no longer holds sway. This book is a first result of this new era. The title could have been Jayavarman VII Reassessed, or New Perspectives on Later Angkor, but the book focuses on the Bayon, perhaps because it is the most extraordinary "document" of its time. But how to read the damned thing?
The conventional story before the interlude in Khmer scholarship went like this. The Bayon was built by Jayavarman VII in the late twelfth century. Angkor at the time was engaged in constant conflict with the Cham, as attested by the war scenes in the Bayon galleries. Although initially interpreted as Hindu, the monument was revealed as Buddhist. The extraordinary faces, locally identified as "Phrom", probably represent Brahma, but the version incorporated into Buddhism rather than a Hindu original. After Jayavarman VII's death, there was a Hindu reaction in which much of the Bayon's statuary was defaced or destroyed. These conflicts of religion and ethnicity somehow contributed to the decline of Angkor, but nobody was quite sure how.
Claude Jacques and Anne-Valerie Schweyer repaint the picture of a simple Khmer vs Cham hostility. Jayavarman VII spent 15 years of his early manhood in the Cham country and maintained strong political connections there. The scenes in the galleries show mixed groups of Cham and Khmer fighting one another, rather than a simple ethnic divide. Jayavarman VII had ambitions to unite the Khmer and Cham, but this ambition seems to have crumbled amid complex factional quarrels.
Religious conflict is also less stark. Hiram Woodward and T. S. Maxwell dispose of the idea of a black-white rivalry between Hindu and Buddhist camps. When the Indian gods came to Southeast Asia they were given new meanings. Siva, Vishnu and Buddha tend to be pictured together rather than apart. Jayavarman VII certainly embraced Buddhism more warmly than his predecessors, but he did not exclude Siva and Vishnu. Moreover, Maxwell finds another fascinating process at work in the Bayon. The corridors and galleries were originally studded with images, installed by individuals and villages, perhaps to honour their ancestors. These images were given Sanskrit names, but these names cannot be found in religious texts. Probably they are translations of Khmer originals. Maxwell thinks the Bayon was an amazing site of the assimilation between Indic gods and local spirits which took place throughout Southeast Asia.
But who are the massive faces staring down from the great towers, and what do they mean? As no document has been found to answer this question, controversy has been provoked to run riot. Peter Sharrock stokes that controversy. He trawls through all the many candidates offered by previous scholars - Buddha, Lokesvara, Buddharaja, the king himself, a local guardian spirit, Brahma - and rejects all of them. He notes that the striking feature of these faces is the open eyes staring straight ahead. Previous images of the Buddha, Bodhisattvas or the king had eyes closed or lowered. The only analogous images of a Buddhist figure staring so powerfully in all directions, Sharrock claims, are in Nepal. Those originals may date to the same era as the Bayon - a time when Buddhism was being driven out of its Indian place-of-origin by Muslim invaders. In this crisis, Sharrock suggests, Buddhist kings in Nepal and Cambodia were drawn to an image of the Buddha which exuded the power of tantrism. Sharrock suggests the faces are Vajrasattva, a form emerging from tantric meditation. He points to other contemporary examples found at Angkor and Banteay Chamar.
In the longest and most intricate chapter in the book, Olivier Cunin traces the sequence of constructing the Bayon, complete with some extraordinary computer-generated simulations. He argues there were originally several other face-towers, including four on the corners of the outer wall. The monument was not built over a previous building but on a greenfield site. The central shrine on the upper level was constructed first, probably with the original Buddha image already inside. The inner terrace was also built early, within the reign of Jayavarman VII, scotching speculation that its Hindu bas-reliefs may be dated later. A magnetic technique shows that the stone came from seven different quarries, and allows Cunin to map a probable sequence of construction in some detail.
In another exhaustive chapter, Vittorio Roveda catalogues all the scenes carved in the inner gallery, outer gallery and the bases of the towers. He agrees with Groslier that the outer gallery is a personal biography of Jayavarman VII, but disagrees greatly on the detail. Most dramatically, Roveda suggests that the famous scene of a naval battle actually records a festival on the Tonle Sap. Why else would the scene by surrounded by homely vignettes of everyday life? In the inner gallery, he emphasizes the variety of Hindu religious imagery - classic versions of Siva and Vishnu and scenes from the Jataka, Ramayana and Mahabharata.
Claude Jacques trawls through the epigraphy, looking both backwards and forwards from Jayavarman VII's reign. The king's parentage was a mixture of Buddhist and Hindu. Jacques surmises that much of the Bayon was built after his reign.
These new research reports are fascinating but confusing. In an invaluable introduction, Michael Vickery helps to place them in perspective. He elegantly recapitulates the story of the Bayon's discovery and its vexed interpretation. He warns the reader that the contributors to this book are far from a team. On the one hand there are "idealists" who read the great religious texts and find an idea which they believe helps to explain the monument. On the other hand there are "materialists" who swarm over the stone blocks and try to conjure some meaning out of the physical object. Vickery quietly regrets there is nobody able to use the inscriptions and the physical evidence to impose some sense and some discipline on the use of text-based ideas.
This book is a huge stride away from the old simplicities about empire, ethnicity and religious conflict - ideas which fascinated the middle and late twentieth century. The Bayon era can no longer be pictured as the root of some cataclysmic downfall. Vickery and Jacques argue convincingly against the contention that Jayavarman VII's death led to an almost immediate Shaivite reaction and abandonment of the capital soon after. They suggest that Angkor remained occupied and important for another couple of centuries. There was certainly some religious conflict, carried out with rival chisels, but we are a long way from understanding it.
This book is a marvellous and stimulating collection of new scholarship which will fascinate anyone drawn to Angkor. But, like all pioneering scholarship, it raises more questions than it answers. What lies behind the extraordinary novelty and uniqueness of the Bayon? What prompted such an eccentric design? What is the meaning of the everyday scenes in the galleries - a question even more intriguing following Roveda's reinterpretation of the naval battle scene. What is the significance of the images which Maxwell suspects were placed by nobles and villagers throughout the maze of corridors? In short, do we understand anything more about Cambodian society and mentality in the Bayon era?
LIVING WITH THE DEVIL: A Meditation on Good and Evil By Stephen Batchelor
BOOK REVIEW; The devil you don't know
1665 words
20 January 2007
Bangkok Post
O3
English
(c) 2007
Mara, the Evil One, may have as much to teach us as Buddha does, according to a book by Stephen Batchelor, which is now available in Thai
PHRA PAISAN VISALO
The Devil comes in myriad shapes and forms. The Tripitaka contains numerous accounts about the Evil One, aka Mara, disguising himself variously as an elephant king, a serpent, a Brahmin priest and a maiden. Sometimes the Devil appears as a farmer or an old man with a hunched back. Sometimes, he even conjures up earthquakes. All these acts are done with an aim of getting his "targets" - Buddha, monks (both male and female) and lay people - to feel fear, doubt, despondency, frustration and, perhaps, to abandon their efforts to propagate dharma (Buddha's teachings) and thus liberate people from the cycle of samsara.
Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil shows how Mara dwells both outside and inside our hearts. Diverse are his manifestations - as clinging and attachment, yearning for security and certainty, fear, doubts, self-forgetfulness and wickedness. All these have one thing in common: They oppress or hinder our capacity to realise truth and freedom.
But if that's all there is to Mara how was it that Buddha, who had realised the utmost freedom, continued to be bothered by him? Hadn't the Awakened One freed himself completely from the Devil's clutches? Here, Stephen Batchelor offers one possible explanation: Buddha was still a human being, and Mara was nothing else than "Gautama's own conflicted humanity".
For Buddhists who worship the Teacher as if he were almost superhuman, this interpretation may be hard to swallow. But we cannot deny the existence of stories about Buddha's doubts. For example, shortly after he attained enlightenment, Buddha noted that he was hesitant to teach dharma to others, seeing it as too difficult for most people to grasp. On another occasion, he harboured doubts about being able to reign over a temporal kingdom without causing harm to himself and others. (Certainly, the Devil had pleaded with him to assume the throne.) These incidents show that the state of Buddhahood did not mean freedom from doubt. Therefore, Buddha could not escape from Mara. The latter may have failed to stop Buddha's quest for enlightenment, but he continued tirelessly to interfere in Buddha's attempts to free the masses from their suffering.
Eventually, the Devil succeeded in putting a check on the Teacher. Old age and sickness prompted Buddha to contemplate the limitations of his life. And death ended all his work. Old age, sickness and death - aren't they just other names for Mara? He followed Buddha everywhere. No matter how the Buddha tried to put off or negotiate (with Mara), he was unable to extend his earthly life for ever. Finally, the Awakened One was assured that the Dharma-Vinaya (Buddhism) he had founded was firm and solid, and that the Sangha community was strong, and so he ceased all his work and entered nirvana.
If we accept that "conflicts" - which include old age, sickness and death - are experienced by every human being, then Batchelor is not mistaken when he argues that similar contradictions reside in Buddha, and that both Buddha and Mara "walk hand in hand together".
However, the close relationships between Buddha and the Devil mean far more than that. If "Mara" refers to a state of mental oppressiveness - be it in the form of craving, fear, lethargy or depression - it is at the same time the cause and conditions of the birth of Buddha. Buddha used to say that without suffering he would not have appeared in this world. As he studied the nature and causes of suffering, he discovered the path to end it, and eventually attained enlightenment by himself.
Both physical and mental oppressiveness may make us suffer. But if we keep our mind stable and aware, and look at it with mindfulness, we will see its transient, impermanent nature. We suffer because we hold on to it as "me and mine". Thus arises the "I" who suffers. When we realise this truth, we can let it go. Liberation from suffering will ensue. In the suffering lies the path to end it. In other words, Mara and Buddha have always been together. The same key is used both to close and open the door. It is the same switch that turns the light on and off. Buddhadasa Bhikkhu often said that "in samsara is nirvana".
Suffering, or the state of oppressiveness and conflicts, is the first of the Four Noble Truths. Our "duty" as prescribed by Buddha is to understand suffering; it is not to be abandoned, but to be understood. (The causes of suffering are what have to be ended.) Understanding suffering through and through will lead to awakening. To live with and be aware of suffering is to liberate ourselves from it. To live with and be aware of Mara is to not let Mara overpower us.
However, the Devil is extremely clever and it's not easy to keep up with him. In the guise of vice, Mara is not that difficult to discern. More fearsome, however, is when he appears in the cloak of virtue. As soon as we start clinging to some [notion of] goodness, we are instantly enslaved by Mara. We become self-indulgent and may hurt others under the pretext of doing good. Countless wars have been declared in the name of God, religion or ideology. Moreover, to cling to the idea of goodness is to become trapped in the cycle of samsara. Unable to let go of self, we are unable to attain enlightenment. Nor does this apply only to clinging to goodness. Even the noble thought of nirvana, as soon as we hold on to it, closes our access to the path towards liberation.
Batchelor also introduces us to another kind of Mara, one not mentioned by either Buddha or the Tripitaka: "Limited and oppressive structure of violence", a term which includes "Army of governments, religion, superpowers, and market forces" plus oppressive and centralised religious institutions and systems. Such structures hinder the culture of awakening that should guide the masses towards ultimate truth and freedom.
Unfortunately, we may have to live with this kind of Mara for a long time to come. But to let him block human potential is not the Buddhist way. To be aware of the presence of this Mara may not be enough, though. We must take steps to induce change in order to help people liberate themselves as well. Batchelor does not give any specific recommendations - readers are given the opportunity to do some exploring themselves.
Living with the Devil portrays the many facets of and depths of meaning to Mara. Readers should try to distinguish between the different meanings; otherwise some misunderstanding, or even frustration, may occur, especially when the writer talks about Mara "walking hand in hand" with Buddha. Ultimately, Batchelor makes the point that the ultimate Devil is our own perception of beings as separate and independent from one another, that each entity is permanent, which is completely against the law of transience and non-self. Even the thought of "I" is dependent on many things, some of which date back 15,000 million years! There is no need to look back so far, though. Without "you" and "others", there will be no "me".
Shadows come out of sunlight. The beautiful lotus grows out of mud. Space exists to provide room for things. Good and evil, Mara and Buddha, may seem like opposites, but they are interdependent; they cannot be separated. To understand that nothing is fixed or independent, including "me", will liberate us from attachment. The duty of Mara is to prevent us from seeing the truth. For, as soon as we can see through [his machinations], we will be freed from his power.
This book was intended more as a philosophical treatise than a religious tome. Since the readers Batchelor primarily has in mind are Westerners with a propensity for rationalisation and secularism, Living with the Devil is often full of thought-provoking passages. Sometimes, his style of writing comes across almost like an invitation to engage in debate. But this is done just to stimulate ideas, to get beyond old sets of beliefs. Many Thai readers may not be familiar with such an approach, though, and may not even understand what the author is trying to get at or where he is heading.
Translator Sodsai Khantiworaphong has done a singularly commendable job in rendering his text into beautiful but succinct Thai. Still, Living with the Devil is not the type of book to be read only once; it must be re-read several times in order to get the whole gist. But even if not everything is clear, several passages in the book are likely to spur us to deep contemplation. And perhaps, in the process, we will develop the wisdom to repel Mara - for we will become aware of the devious snares he sets - and in the nick of time, too.
This is a slightly shortened translation of the preface Phra Paisan Visalo wrote to 'Living with the Devil'. As part of the official book launch, the publisher has invited this respected monk plus two other speakers - Sulak Sivaraksa and Suwanna Satha-anant - to share their views on how we can achieve spiritual freedom despite, or because of, the evil in our hearts. Pinyo Traisuriyadhamma will act as moderator. The event will be held this Monday, from 1.30pm, at Thailand Book Tower, Sathorn Soi 12 (opposite St Louis Hospital). There is no admission fee. For more details, call 02-222-5698 or 02-622-0955 or 02-622-0966.
LIVING WITH THE DEVIL:
A Meditation on Good and Evil
By Stephen Batchelor
Translated into Thai by Sodsai Khantiworaphong as `You Kab Mara
Suan Ngern Mee Ma, 210 baht.
ISBN 978-974-88162-5-8
1665 words
20 January 2007
Bangkok Post
O3
English
(c) 2007
Mara, the Evil One, may have as much to teach us as Buddha does, according to a book by Stephen Batchelor, which is now available in Thai
PHRA PAISAN VISALO
The Devil comes in myriad shapes and forms. The Tripitaka contains numerous accounts about the Evil One, aka Mara, disguising himself variously as an elephant king, a serpent, a Brahmin priest and a maiden. Sometimes the Devil appears as a farmer or an old man with a hunched back. Sometimes, he even conjures up earthquakes. All these acts are done with an aim of getting his "targets" - Buddha, monks (both male and female) and lay people - to feel fear, doubt, despondency, frustration and, perhaps, to abandon their efforts to propagate dharma (Buddha's teachings) and thus liberate people from the cycle of samsara.
Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil shows how Mara dwells both outside and inside our hearts. Diverse are his manifestations - as clinging and attachment, yearning for security and certainty, fear, doubts, self-forgetfulness and wickedness. All these have one thing in common: They oppress or hinder our capacity to realise truth and freedom.
But if that's all there is to Mara how was it that Buddha, who had realised the utmost freedom, continued to be bothered by him? Hadn't the Awakened One freed himself completely from the Devil's clutches? Here, Stephen Batchelor offers one possible explanation: Buddha was still a human being, and Mara was nothing else than "Gautama's own conflicted humanity".
For Buddhists who worship the Teacher as if he were almost superhuman, this interpretation may be hard to swallow. But we cannot deny the existence of stories about Buddha's doubts. For example, shortly after he attained enlightenment, Buddha noted that he was hesitant to teach dharma to others, seeing it as too difficult for most people to grasp. On another occasion, he harboured doubts about being able to reign over a temporal kingdom without causing harm to himself and others. (Certainly, the Devil had pleaded with him to assume the throne.) These incidents show that the state of Buddhahood did not mean freedom from doubt. Therefore, Buddha could not escape from Mara. The latter may have failed to stop Buddha's quest for enlightenment, but he continued tirelessly to interfere in Buddha's attempts to free the masses from their suffering.
Eventually, the Devil succeeded in putting a check on the Teacher. Old age and sickness prompted Buddha to contemplate the limitations of his life. And death ended all his work. Old age, sickness and death - aren't they just other names for Mara? He followed Buddha everywhere. No matter how the Buddha tried to put off or negotiate (with Mara), he was unable to extend his earthly life for ever. Finally, the Awakened One was assured that the Dharma-Vinaya (Buddhism) he had founded was firm and solid, and that the Sangha community was strong, and so he ceased all his work and entered nirvana.
If we accept that "conflicts" - which include old age, sickness and death - are experienced by every human being, then Batchelor is not mistaken when he argues that similar contradictions reside in Buddha, and that both Buddha and Mara "walk hand in hand together".
However, the close relationships between Buddha and the Devil mean far more than that. If "Mara" refers to a state of mental oppressiveness - be it in the form of craving, fear, lethargy or depression - it is at the same time the cause and conditions of the birth of Buddha. Buddha used to say that without suffering he would not have appeared in this world. As he studied the nature and causes of suffering, he discovered the path to end it, and eventually attained enlightenment by himself.
Both physical and mental oppressiveness may make us suffer. But if we keep our mind stable and aware, and look at it with mindfulness, we will see its transient, impermanent nature. We suffer because we hold on to it as "me and mine". Thus arises the "I" who suffers. When we realise this truth, we can let it go. Liberation from suffering will ensue. In the suffering lies the path to end it. In other words, Mara and Buddha have always been together. The same key is used both to close and open the door. It is the same switch that turns the light on and off. Buddhadasa Bhikkhu often said that "in samsara is nirvana".
Suffering, or the state of oppressiveness and conflicts, is the first of the Four Noble Truths. Our "duty" as prescribed by Buddha is to understand suffering; it is not to be abandoned, but to be understood. (The causes of suffering are what have to be ended.) Understanding suffering through and through will lead to awakening. To live with and be aware of suffering is to liberate ourselves from it. To live with and be aware of Mara is to not let Mara overpower us.
However, the Devil is extremely clever and it's not easy to keep up with him. In the guise of vice, Mara is not that difficult to discern. More fearsome, however, is when he appears in the cloak of virtue. As soon as we start clinging to some [notion of] goodness, we are instantly enslaved by Mara. We become self-indulgent and may hurt others under the pretext of doing good. Countless wars have been declared in the name of God, religion or ideology. Moreover, to cling to the idea of goodness is to become trapped in the cycle of samsara. Unable to let go of self, we are unable to attain enlightenment. Nor does this apply only to clinging to goodness. Even the noble thought of nirvana, as soon as we hold on to it, closes our access to the path towards liberation.
Batchelor also introduces us to another kind of Mara, one not mentioned by either Buddha or the Tripitaka: "Limited and oppressive structure of violence", a term which includes "Army of governments, religion, superpowers, and market forces" plus oppressive and centralised religious institutions and systems. Such structures hinder the culture of awakening that should guide the masses towards ultimate truth and freedom.
Unfortunately, we may have to live with this kind of Mara for a long time to come. But to let him block human potential is not the Buddhist way. To be aware of the presence of this Mara may not be enough, though. We must take steps to induce change in order to help people liberate themselves as well. Batchelor does not give any specific recommendations - readers are given the opportunity to do some exploring themselves.
Living with the Devil portrays the many facets of and depths of meaning to Mara. Readers should try to distinguish between the different meanings; otherwise some misunderstanding, or even frustration, may occur, especially when the writer talks about Mara "walking hand in hand" with Buddha. Ultimately, Batchelor makes the point that the ultimate Devil is our own perception of beings as separate and independent from one another, that each entity is permanent, which is completely against the law of transience and non-self. Even the thought of "I" is dependent on many things, some of which date back 15,000 million years! There is no need to look back so far, though. Without "you" and "others", there will be no "me".
Shadows come out of sunlight. The beautiful lotus grows out of mud. Space exists to provide room for things. Good and evil, Mara and Buddha, may seem like opposites, but they are interdependent; they cannot be separated. To understand that nothing is fixed or independent, including "me", will liberate us from attachment. The duty of Mara is to prevent us from seeing the truth. For, as soon as we can see through [his machinations], we will be freed from his power.
This book was intended more as a philosophical treatise than a religious tome. Since the readers Batchelor primarily has in mind are Westerners with a propensity for rationalisation and secularism, Living with the Devil is often full of thought-provoking passages. Sometimes, his style of writing comes across almost like an invitation to engage in debate. But this is done just to stimulate ideas, to get beyond old sets of beliefs. Many Thai readers may not be familiar with such an approach, though, and may not even understand what the author is trying to get at or where he is heading.
Translator Sodsai Khantiworaphong has done a singularly commendable job in rendering his text into beautiful but succinct Thai. Still, Living with the Devil is not the type of book to be read only once; it must be re-read several times in order to get the whole gist. But even if not everything is clear, several passages in the book are likely to spur us to deep contemplation. And perhaps, in the process, we will develop the wisdom to repel Mara - for we will become aware of the devious snares he sets - and in the nick of time, too.
This is a slightly shortened translation of the preface Phra Paisan Visalo wrote to 'Living with the Devil'. As part of the official book launch, the publisher has invited this respected monk plus two other speakers - Sulak Sivaraksa and Suwanna Satha-anant - to share their views on how we can achieve spiritual freedom despite, or because of, the evil in our hearts. Pinyo Traisuriyadhamma will act as moderator. The event will be held this Monday, from 1.30pm, at Thailand Book Tower, Sathorn Soi 12 (opposite St Louis Hospital). There is no admission fee. For more details, call 02-222-5698 or 02-622-0955 or 02-622-0966.
LIVING WITH THE DEVIL:
A Meditation on Good and Evil
By Stephen Batchelor
Translated into Thai by Sodsai Khantiworaphong as `You Kab Mara
Suan Ngern Mee Ma, 210 baht.
ISBN 978-974-88162-5-8
Temple of unreason; Tibetan Book of the Dead
Temple of unreason.(The Tibetan Book of the Dead )(Book review)
Bearn, Mark
929 words
15 January 2007
New Statesman
54
ISSN: 1364-7431; Volume 136; Issue 4827
English
Copyright 2007 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
eds Graham Coleman and Thupten Jinpa, trans. Gyurme Dorje
Penguin, 592pp, [pounds sterling]12.99
W H Auden claimed that bad books wither and vanish like dead leaves, and critics shouldn't waste their energies on them. The strangely enduring role in western culture of the Tibetan Book of the Dead suggests that he was wrong. The book has been around since 1927, when a rich wandering American called W Y Evans-Wentz published a translation by a melancholy Tibetan schoolteacher of the Bardo Thodol ("The Great Liberation by Hearing"), a manuscript Evans-Wentz had acquired on his travels in the Indian Himalayas. A shrewd self-publicist, he named it after the voguish Egyptian Book of the Dead. It has never lacked disciples.
In the 1930s Carl Jung, later to endorse Mein Kampf and flying saucers, provided a woolly "psychological commentary" on the text. In 1960 Timothy Leary, LSD evangelist, produced The Psychedelic Experience: a manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead--a surprisingly lucid guide to taking acid, rendered absurd by linking it to "Tibetan" stages of death and rebirth. Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Philip K Dick, Will Self and countless seekers after truth all claim to have derived inspiration from it. This 21st-century edition, purged of druggy connotations and clearly aimed at the New Age market, allows us to ask: why has a book so unconnected to genuine Buddhist teaching exercised such a powerful hold on western imaginations?
In one sense, the Tibetan Book of the Dead is simply translations from a vast 17th-century anthology of Tibetan Buddhist funerary rites, designed to be read by priests at the bedside of the dying. The purpose of such rites, given Buddhist belief in reincarnation, is obvious: to assist the deceased's rebirth in a higher state of grace, and eventually to attain nirvana, the complete dissolution of self. Those whose lives have lacked spiritual discipline can expect the opposite, as the text warns: they "will indeed fall into the great abyss of cyclic existence and be tortured unbearably"--and be reborn as a dog in a dog-kennel.
This new Penguin translation contains the most extensive compilation of these texts in English, ranging from endless incantations and exhortations to the "Great Liberation by Hearing", which occupies a quarter of the book. This is an account of the demons that one will encounter after death, such as Yama, who will "sever your head at the neck, extract your heart, pull out your entrails, eat your flesh and suck your bones". This chapter is easily the best, yet still repetitive. Imagine the children's book The Gruffalo, at inordinate length, without the jokes.
This edition does nothing to make the book less weird, or to clarify its enduring popularity, but it does trail an army of new devotees. Joanna Lumley claims that it "opens a compassionate window on to an ancient and unfamiliar landscape and makes it seem like home". She must have skipped the chapter on recognising symptoms of illness, which includes this:
If the semen of a man is reddish,
He may die or be subjected to slander after six months.
However, if its whiteness is undiminished,
There is no obstacle to life,
And the semen should be inhaled through the nose, while it is still
warm.
In similar vein, Gayle Hunnicutt believes that reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead "will give me greater peace of mind and benefit all around me". Did she get much peace of mind from the advice for averting death? "One should face westwards towards the sun when it is close to setting, and remove one's clothes. Then placing a dog's tail under you and some excrement in a heap in front, one should eat a mouthful of excrement, and bark like a dog. Repeat three times."
One could tolerate this if there was also profound Buddhist wisdom here; after all, anyone who has visited a Tibetan Buddhist temple knows that its arts are obsessed with demons and bodily fluids. But the paucity of philosophy in these chapters is striking. At best, one finds occasional reiterations of Buddhist principles couched in childlike terms: discard your ego, renounce the illusion of earthly attachments, act with compassion towards others. But that's about it--those in search of an explanation of Buddhist philosophy, or any sense of the clarity and beauty of the Buddha's teachings, could glean more from the Buddha's Wikipedia entry than from these hundreds of pages. No wonder serious scholars of Tibetan culture view the Tibetan Book of the Dead as an amusing curiosity, a hangover from pre-Buddhist animist traditions in Tibet, targeted at superstitious rural folk.
On a visit to an isolated Buddhist village in the Himalayas last winter, I asked the local priest to perform a ceremony to bless our journey. We crouched on the floor of his dark temple while he recited pages of Buddhist scripture, occasionally beating a drum. After the ceremony was over, I asked him the meaning of the words he'd read out, and he confessed he had no idea. He could read the Tibetan, he explained, but he couldn't understand it. "It keeps the villagers happy, though," he told me, grinning. "They don't understand it either!" It is depressing to think that the western readers of the Tibetan Book of the Dead are equally in the dark.
Bearn, Mark
929 words
15 January 2007
New Statesman
54
ISSN: 1364-7431; Volume 136; Issue 4827
English
Copyright 2007 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
eds Graham Coleman and Thupten Jinpa, trans. Gyurme Dorje
Penguin, 592pp, [pounds sterling]12.99
W H Auden claimed that bad books wither and vanish like dead leaves, and critics shouldn't waste their energies on them. The strangely enduring role in western culture of the Tibetan Book of the Dead suggests that he was wrong. The book has been around since 1927, when a rich wandering American called W Y Evans-Wentz published a translation by a melancholy Tibetan schoolteacher of the Bardo Thodol ("The Great Liberation by Hearing"), a manuscript Evans-Wentz had acquired on his travels in the Indian Himalayas. A shrewd self-publicist, he named it after the voguish Egyptian Book of the Dead. It has never lacked disciples.
In the 1930s Carl Jung, later to endorse Mein Kampf and flying saucers, provided a woolly "psychological commentary" on the text. In 1960 Timothy Leary, LSD evangelist, produced The Psychedelic Experience: a manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead--a surprisingly lucid guide to taking acid, rendered absurd by linking it to "Tibetan" stages of death and rebirth. Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Philip K Dick, Will Self and countless seekers after truth all claim to have derived inspiration from it. This 21st-century edition, purged of druggy connotations and clearly aimed at the New Age market, allows us to ask: why has a book so unconnected to genuine Buddhist teaching exercised such a powerful hold on western imaginations?
In one sense, the Tibetan Book of the Dead is simply translations from a vast 17th-century anthology of Tibetan Buddhist funerary rites, designed to be read by priests at the bedside of the dying. The purpose of such rites, given Buddhist belief in reincarnation, is obvious: to assist the deceased's rebirth in a higher state of grace, and eventually to attain nirvana, the complete dissolution of self. Those whose lives have lacked spiritual discipline can expect the opposite, as the text warns: they "will indeed fall into the great abyss of cyclic existence and be tortured unbearably"--and be reborn as a dog in a dog-kennel.
This new Penguin translation contains the most extensive compilation of these texts in English, ranging from endless incantations and exhortations to the "Great Liberation by Hearing", which occupies a quarter of the book. This is an account of the demons that one will encounter after death, such as Yama, who will "sever your head at the neck, extract your heart, pull out your entrails, eat your flesh and suck your bones". This chapter is easily the best, yet still repetitive. Imagine the children's book The Gruffalo, at inordinate length, without the jokes.
This edition does nothing to make the book less weird, or to clarify its enduring popularity, but it does trail an army of new devotees. Joanna Lumley claims that it "opens a compassionate window on to an ancient and unfamiliar landscape and makes it seem like home". She must have skipped the chapter on recognising symptoms of illness, which includes this:
If the semen of a man is reddish,
He may die or be subjected to slander after six months.
However, if its whiteness is undiminished,
There is no obstacle to life,
And the semen should be inhaled through the nose, while it is still
warm.
In similar vein, Gayle Hunnicutt believes that reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead "will give me greater peace of mind and benefit all around me". Did she get much peace of mind from the advice for averting death? "One should face westwards towards the sun when it is close to setting, and remove one's clothes. Then placing a dog's tail under you and some excrement in a heap in front, one should eat a mouthful of excrement, and bark like a dog. Repeat three times."
One could tolerate this if there was also profound Buddhist wisdom here; after all, anyone who has visited a Tibetan Buddhist temple knows that its arts are obsessed with demons and bodily fluids. But the paucity of philosophy in these chapters is striking. At best, one finds occasional reiterations of Buddhist principles couched in childlike terms: discard your ego, renounce the illusion of earthly attachments, act with compassion towards others. But that's about it--those in search of an explanation of Buddhist philosophy, or any sense of the clarity and beauty of the Buddha's teachings, could glean more from the Buddha's Wikipedia entry than from these hundreds of pages. No wonder serious scholars of Tibetan culture view the Tibetan Book of the Dead as an amusing curiosity, a hangover from pre-Buddhist animist traditions in Tibet, targeted at superstitious rural folk.
On a visit to an isolated Buddhist village in the Himalayas last winter, I asked the local priest to perform a ceremony to bless our journey. We crouched on the floor of his dark temple while he recited pages of Buddhist scripture, occasionally beating a drum. After the ceremony was over, I asked him the meaning of the words he'd read out, and he confessed he had no idea. He could read the Tibetan, he explained, but he couldn't understand it. "It keeps the villagers happy, though," he told me, grinning. "They don't understand it either!" It is depressing to think that the western readers of the Tibetan Book of the Dead are equally in the dark.
Pictures, words, understandings by Buddhadasa Bhikku
BOOK REVIEW; Pictures, words, understandings
1194 words
30 December 2006
Bangkok Post
O3
English
(c) 2006
Book by the late Buddhadasa Bhikku offers an easy approach to Buddhism
JEFFERY SNG
'Wanna know all about Thai Buddhism?" asked Don Sweetbaum, a slim, bearded farang activist (in the hippie mould) now turned Buddhist and living in Chiang Mai.
"Try picking up, randomly, any book on Buddhist philosophy or Buddhist ethics that you see on the shelf," said Sweetbaum, gesturing to a row of books on Buddhism at a second-hand book shop on Thapae Road in Chiang Mai city. "Unreadable ... right?"
But wait, here's some good news.
"There's a new book about Thai Buddhism in English with lots of beautiful pictures," Sweetbaum announced. Entitled Teaching Dhamma by Pictures, it was written by the late Buddhadasa Bhikku and was reprinted this year by the Sathirakoses-Nagapradipa Foundation in collaboration with the Ministry of Education.
For lazy readers, this may be just the right book on Buddhism for beginners.
After all, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Comic books appeal to children because they help to overcome textual difficulties by using pictures and vivid imagery. The same principle is at work here.
For the newcomer to Buddhism, looking for a simple, yet exciting introduction to Buddhist philosophy, a la "Buddhism 101", "Thai Buddhism for Dummies" or "Buddhism for Beginners", Buddhadasa's book may be just what the doctor ordered.
And it's not just beginners who should read Teaching Dhamma by Pictures. Advanced students of Buddhism will also benefit immensely. Teaching Dhamma is a philosophically profound and artistic book that appeals on many intellectual levels simultaneously. Buddhadasa used art and religious symbolism as a tool to explain the Buddhist world view. The religious paintings serve as a snapshot of the content, ingredients, characters, relationships and meanings of the Buddhist universe.
Mind and Body
An image entitled Mind and Body employs symbolism to illustrate Buddhist philosophical beliefs about mind and body. Buddhadasa explained that "body is represented by the earthenware vessels [carried by the man on the left] while mind is shown as the whimsical, swift and restless monkeys". The symbolism of the monkey representing the mind was also used in Lord Buddha's discourses.
In the picture the monkeys prove themselves adept at avoiding capture and the hunters have difficulty shooting down these agile creatures. The meaning is that the monkey, or mind, is difficult to control. The body, however, is mere clay and cannot move by itself. It is also fragile and easily broken. The meaning is that human existence is impermanent. In Buddhist epistemology the human being is made up of two components: Mind and body.
In Buddhist symbolism, the body is also sometimes represented by a ship. In the picture Saccamilomika-nana, or "The Ninth Stage of Knowledge Derived from Conformity with Truth", the ship represents the body (rupa) and the owner of the ship standing at the bow is the mind (citta). Buddhadasa explained: "The ship is crossing from the burning world of mortality to the other shore of Nibbana, which is represented by the Three Gems, to which the owner of the ship [the mind] points. The crew and equipment on board are the various teachings necessary to cross the seas of wandering-on in birth-and-death [samsara]. The Noble Eight-fold Path and other necessary dharmas such as faith [saddha] and wisdom [panna] are essentials to guide the ship across."
Saccamilomika-nana
Buddhadasa offers many more examples, translating various points of dharma into symbolic pictures. The book contains a collection of 47 pictures, in colour plates, reproduced from an old Buddhist manuscript found in Chaiya, southern Thailand, about 100 years ago. Teaching Dhamma by Pictures is based on Buddhadasa's explanations of this famed Chaiya Manuscript. It was in Chaiya that Buddhadasa set up his famous meditation centre, and from where he would exert a profound influence on Thai Buddhism through his teachings, sermons and explanations of Buddhist texts, paintings and manuscripts.
The manuscript was discovered in Chaiya before Buddhadasa went to preach there. Although it was created before Buddhadasa's time, it supports his world view of harmony between man and nature. Natural symbols, including birds, snakes and trees, represent human emotions that give meaning to human existence. Buddhadasa used the manuscript in his preaching and sermons. His profound explanations of the 47 pictures contained in the manuscript became widely known throughout the country during his lifetime.
Sulak Sivaraksa and Sweetbaum translated Buddhadasa's explanations of the 47 pictures from this Siamese text prepared by the late Rabil Bunnag, who was also a gifted photographer, into English. The first edition was published in 1960. Forty-six years later, with generous support from the Asia Foundation, the Venerable Bhikku Khantipalo edited and improved the English translation and Miss E. Lyons added a lucid introduction to the book, which was reprinted for the centenary celebrations of the birth of Buddhadasa (May 27, 1906).
The venerable monk passed away on May 27, 2006.
The timely reprinting of Buddhadasa's discourses on Buddhist symbolism also coincided with a new intellectual fashion created by the massive international reception accorded Dan Brown's blockbuster The Da Vinci Code. Thanks to Brown's novel, which was made into a Hollywood movie, the subject of pagan symbolism has become the 21st century's new intellectual craze. The search for clues and hidden symbolism in ancient paintings, artefacts and antique works of art has suddenly come into vogue.
Said Sweetbaum: "Buddhadasa's book is a virtual treasure trove of exotic Buddhist symbols."
Reminiscent of the history of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, art in ancient Siam was also put at the service of religion. Ancient Siamese Buddhism had effectively enlisted the artist to teach dharma by pictures. Temple manuscripts and mural paintings were used to tell the story of the Buddha in his various reincarnations and to communicate important religious teachings by means of pictorial examples. But the similarity between the Siamese painter and his Western counterpart basically ends there.
Unlike Leornado da Vinci, who painted the Mona Lisa, Siamese artists did not try to work in an original, individual style; they did not aim to express their own personality or a particular philosophy of theirs. In fact, they rarely signed their paintings. Thus, the traditional temple painter of Siam had little connection with the credo of the modern artist. The Siamese artist and the modern Western artist belong to two quite different paradigms.
There were no Van Goghs, Rembrandts or Monets in traditional Siam. The Siamese artist does not claim ownership of the painting like his Western counterpart does. Unlike Leonardo da Vinci, the Siamese artist does not work alone but usually as part of a team. Temple murals were usually painted by many artists working together. One artist may specialise in painting architecture and another may paint only figures. The complete painting usually reflects the work of many hands.
Thus, Buddhadasa's book contains more than just the secrets of religious symbolism. The pictures also speak to the symbolist and the modern artist about the exotic communal traditions in the craft of Siamese manuscript and temple-mural painting.
1194 words
30 December 2006
Bangkok Post
O3
English
(c) 2006
Book by the late Buddhadasa Bhikku offers an easy approach to Buddhism
JEFFERY SNG
'Wanna know all about Thai Buddhism?" asked Don Sweetbaum, a slim, bearded farang activist (in the hippie mould) now turned Buddhist and living in Chiang Mai.
"Try picking up, randomly, any book on Buddhist philosophy or Buddhist ethics that you see on the shelf," said Sweetbaum, gesturing to a row of books on Buddhism at a second-hand book shop on Thapae Road in Chiang Mai city. "Unreadable ... right?"
But wait, here's some good news.
"There's a new book about Thai Buddhism in English with lots of beautiful pictures," Sweetbaum announced. Entitled Teaching Dhamma by Pictures, it was written by the late Buddhadasa Bhikku and was reprinted this year by the Sathirakoses-Nagapradipa Foundation in collaboration with the Ministry of Education.
For lazy readers, this may be just the right book on Buddhism for beginners.
After all, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Comic books appeal to children because they help to overcome textual difficulties by using pictures and vivid imagery. The same principle is at work here.
For the newcomer to Buddhism, looking for a simple, yet exciting introduction to Buddhist philosophy, a la "Buddhism 101", "Thai Buddhism for Dummies" or "Buddhism for Beginners", Buddhadasa's book may be just what the doctor ordered.
And it's not just beginners who should read Teaching Dhamma by Pictures. Advanced students of Buddhism will also benefit immensely. Teaching Dhamma is a philosophically profound and artistic book that appeals on many intellectual levels simultaneously. Buddhadasa used art and religious symbolism as a tool to explain the Buddhist world view. The religious paintings serve as a snapshot of the content, ingredients, characters, relationships and meanings of the Buddhist universe.
Mind and Body
An image entitled Mind and Body employs symbolism to illustrate Buddhist philosophical beliefs about mind and body. Buddhadasa explained that "body is represented by the earthenware vessels [carried by the man on the left] while mind is shown as the whimsical, swift and restless monkeys". The symbolism of the monkey representing the mind was also used in Lord Buddha's discourses.
In the picture the monkeys prove themselves adept at avoiding capture and the hunters have difficulty shooting down these agile creatures. The meaning is that the monkey, or mind, is difficult to control. The body, however, is mere clay and cannot move by itself. It is also fragile and easily broken. The meaning is that human existence is impermanent. In Buddhist epistemology the human being is made up of two components: Mind and body.
In Buddhist symbolism, the body is also sometimes represented by a ship. In the picture Saccamilomika-nana, or "The Ninth Stage of Knowledge Derived from Conformity with Truth", the ship represents the body (rupa) and the owner of the ship standing at the bow is the mind (citta). Buddhadasa explained: "The ship is crossing from the burning world of mortality to the other shore of Nibbana, which is represented by the Three Gems, to which the owner of the ship [the mind] points. The crew and equipment on board are the various teachings necessary to cross the seas of wandering-on in birth-and-death [samsara]. The Noble Eight-fold Path and other necessary dharmas such as faith [saddha] and wisdom [panna] are essentials to guide the ship across."
Saccamilomika-nana
Buddhadasa offers many more examples, translating various points of dharma into symbolic pictures. The book contains a collection of 47 pictures, in colour plates, reproduced from an old Buddhist manuscript found in Chaiya, southern Thailand, about 100 years ago. Teaching Dhamma by Pictures is based on Buddhadasa's explanations of this famed Chaiya Manuscript. It was in Chaiya that Buddhadasa set up his famous meditation centre, and from where he would exert a profound influence on Thai Buddhism through his teachings, sermons and explanations of Buddhist texts, paintings and manuscripts.
The manuscript was discovered in Chaiya before Buddhadasa went to preach there. Although it was created before Buddhadasa's time, it supports his world view of harmony between man and nature. Natural symbols, including birds, snakes and trees, represent human emotions that give meaning to human existence. Buddhadasa used the manuscript in his preaching and sermons. His profound explanations of the 47 pictures contained in the manuscript became widely known throughout the country during his lifetime.
Sulak Sivaraksa and Sweetbaum translated Buddhadasa's explanations of the 47 pictures from this Siamese text prepared by the late Rabil Bunnag, who was also a gifted photographer, into English. The first edition was published in 1960. Forty-six years later, with generous support from the Asia Foundation, the Venerable Bhikku Khantipalo edited and improved the English translation and Miss E. Lyons added a lucid introduction to the book, which was reprinted for the centenary celebrations of the birth of Buddhadasa (May 27, 1906).
The venerable monk passed away on May 27, 2006.
The timely reprinting of Buddhadasa's discourses on Buddhist symbolism also coincided with a new intellectual fashion created by the massive international reception accorded Dan Brown's blockbuster The Da Vinci Code. Thanks to Brown's novel, which was made into a Hollywood movie, the subject of pagan symbolism has become the 21st century's new intellectual craze. The search for clues and hidden symbolism in ancient paintings, artefacts and antique works of art has suddenly come into vogue.
Said Sweetbaum: "Buddhadasa's book is a virtual treasure trove of exotic Buddhist symbols."
Reminiscent of the history of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, art in ancient Siam was also put at the service of religion. Ancient Siamese Buddhism had effectively enlisted the artist to teach dharma by pictures. Temple manuscripts and mural paintings were used to tell the story of the Buddha in his various reincarnations and to communicate important religious teachings by means of pictorial examples. But the similarity between the Siamese painter and his Western counterpart basically ends there.
Unlike Leornado da Vinci, who painted the Mona Lisa, Siamese artists did not try to work in an original, individual style; they did not aim to express their own personality or a particular philosophy of theirs. In fact, they rarely signed their paintings. Thus, the traditional temple painter of Siam had little connection with the credo of the modern artist. The Siamese artist and the modern Western artist belong to two quite different paradigms.
There were no Van Goghs, Rembrandts or Monets in traditional Siam. The Siamese artist does not claim ownership of the painting like his Western counterpart does. Unlike Leonardo da Vinci, the Siamese artist does not work alone but usually as part of a team. Temple murals were usually painted by many artists working together. One artist may specialise in painting architecture and another may paint only figures. The complete painting usually reflects the work of many hands.
Thus, Buddhadasa's book contains more than just the secrets of religious symbolism. The pictures also speak to the symbolist and the modern artist about the exotic communal traditions in the craft of Siamese manuscript and temple-mural painting.
A Buddhist icon's wisdom collected by Ellis Widner
BOOK REVIEW A Buddhist icon's wisdom collected
- Ellis Widner
502 words
30 June 2007
The Arkansas Democrat Gazette
19
English
Copyright (c) 2007 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.
In his Asian Journal, Thomas Merton described Tibetan Buddhist lama Chatral Rinpoche as a "very impressive person ... so obviously a great man." The Catholic monk and writer said he was "profoundly moved" by their November 1968 meeting and discussion on meditation and dzogchen, or direct realization, as well as Buddhist and Christian doctrine.
About his experience with Chatral Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan lamas, Merton wrote: "... the most significant thing of all [was] the way we were able to communicate with one another and share an essentially spiritual experience of `Buddhism' which is also somehow in harmony with Christianity." Merton died less than a month later in Thailand.
Now 93, Chatral Rinpoche is often described as the greatest living dzogchen master. Much of his life has been spent in retreat; his public teachings are rare. Yet he has gained fame on the strength and integrity of those teachings and the example of his life. It certainly is not a fame gained from writing books because, until now, there never has been one, although he has been mentioned in many and figures prominently in Ian Baker's compelling spiritual travelogue Heart of the World.
Compassionate Action (Snow Lion, $14.95) is the first book that collects a few of Rinpoche's translated teachings and writings. Editor Zach Larson opens the slim volume with a short biography.
Chapters explore aspects of the spiritual life for which Rinpoche (a Tibetan word meaning precious teacher) has become known, including his eloquent and clear teaching on vegetarianism ("Because when you take meat you have to take a being's life. So I gave it up.") and sacred geography - places of enlightenment.
A fascinating segment focuses on Rinpoche's annual trip to Calcutta, India, to buy live fish at the markets, which he releases - some 70 truckloads of them, Larson says - back into the ocean. It is, Larson writes, an expression of Buddhism's bodhisattva vow: that all beings have undergone countless incarnations and, at one point or another, any living creature has been one's mother in a past life.
Larson writes: "Therefore, it is viewed as an obligation to repay the kindness of those who are referred to as `mother sentient beings' ... Rinpoche prays for each fish, that they may one day reach the highest state of perfect enlightenment .... " How does this teacher see himself? "I am just an ordinary sentient being and there is nothing special about me," Rinpoche says. "I just follow the teachings of Lord Buddha. Without any cheating on my part, I stand firmly on the ground in practicing the Dharma and in helping all sentient beings." Compassionate Action includes several pages of photographs and a few prayers written by Rinpoche, including "A Prayer to Avert Nuclear War." Chatral Rinpoche doesn't mince words, but that directness is imbued with the deep compassion and wisdom that inspired Merton nearly 40 years ago.
- Ellis Widner
502 words
30 June 2007
The Arkansas Democrat Gazette
19
English
Copyright (c) 2007 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.
In his Asian Journal, Thomas Merton described Tibetan Buddhist lama Chatral Rinpoche as a "very impressive person ... so obviously a great man." The Catholic monk and writer said he was "profoundly moved" by their November 1968 meeting and discussion on meditation and dzogchen, or direct realization, as well as Buddhist and Christian doctrine.
About his experience with Chatral Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan lamas, Merton wrote: "... the most significant thing of all [was] the way we were able to communicate with one another and share an essentially spiritual experience of `Buddhism' which is also somehow in harmony with Christianity." Merton died less than a month later in Thailand.
Now 93, Chatral Rinpoche is often described as the greatest living dzogchen master. Much of his life has been spent in retreat; his public teachings are rare. Yet he has gained fame on the strength and integrity of those teachings and the example of his life. It certainly is not a fame gained from writing books because, until now, there never has been one, although he has been mentioned in many and figures prominently in Ian Baker's compelling spiritual travelogue Heart of the World.
Compassionate Action (Snow Lion, $14.95) is the first book that collects a few of Rinpoche's translated teachings and writings. Editor Zach Larson opens the slim volume with a short biography.
Chapters explore aspects of the spiritual life for which Rinpoche (a Tibetan word meaning precious teacher) has become known, including his eloquent and clear teaching on vegetarianism ("Because when you take meat you have to take a being's life. So I gave it up.") and sacred geography - places of enlightenment.
A fascinating segment focuses on Rinpoche's annual trip to Calcutta, India, to buy live fish at the markets, which he releases - some 70 truckloads of them, Larson says - back into the ocean. It is, Larson writes, an expression of Buddhism's bodhisattva vow: that all beings have undergone countless incarnations and, at one point or another, any living creature has been one's mother in a past life.
Larson writes: "Therefore, it is viewed as an obligation to repay the kindness of those who are referred to as `mother sentient beings' ... Rinpoche prays for each fish, that they may one day reach the highest state of perfect enlightenment .... " How does this teacher see himself? "I am just an ordinary sentient being and there is nothing special about me," Rinpoche says. "I just follow the teachings of Lord Buddha. Without any cheating on my part, I stand firmly on the ground in practicing the Dharma and in helping all sentient beings." Compassionate Action includes several pages of photographs and a few prayers written by Rinpoche, including "A Prayer to Avert Nuclear War." Chatral Rinpoche doesn't mince words, but that directness is imbued with the deep compassion and wisdom that inspired Merton nearly 40 years ago.
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