Books Reviews on Buddhism

The Hatchet Buddha by Rebecca Gayle Howell

2008-06-30T03:42:00.000-07:00

BOOK REVIEW; Howell's poems freeing body, spirit
Frederick Smock Special to The Courier-Journal
344 words
21 June 2008
The Courier-Journal Louisville, KY
METRO
11
English
(c) Copyright 2008, The Courier-Journal. All Rights Reserved.

'Hatchet Buddha' is enlightening

By Frederick Smock

Special to The Courier-Journal

The Buddha, you will recall, sought a release from human suffering. The Hatchet Buddha — represented as a female, holding a cleaver in one hand, her sex in the other — sought a release from the suffering occasioned by love. Her quest was not exclusively an ancient one.

Poet Rebecca Howell passes this figure of the Hatchet Buddha through several historical incarnations: the sometime-wife of the Hindu god Ganesha; the wife of Jonah; Joan of Arc; and, among others, the poet herself?

The women in these poems are visited by "wrathful deities" who appear as lovers (dangerous men always appear as lovers, don't they?) and who promise to combine metaphysical teachings with their ardor. But beware:

Angels are made to deliver

So when they go, a girl is left

baited and waiting

These lovers all seek one or another means of subjugating the women they visit. An over-arching theme here, within these poems, is that of the female intellect working to assert some independence of body and spirit.

In the dark, we grope

When we grope, we grab

If this love must be a wrestling

one of us will be pinned to the ground

While informed by Buddhism, mythology and history, these poems nonetheless float above the philosophical scrum, upon a felicity of phrasing, and an irresistible lightness of being. It is a high "ground" that the poet chooses for her characters.

Rebecca Howell is an intelligent and insightful poet, whose work entertains even as it enlightens. Her poems are graced by exquisitely inventive drawings by Arwen Donahue.

All the principals here — poet, artist, publisher — are Kentuckians, adding to the state's already considerable literary mystique.

Frederick Smock is chairman of the English department at Bellarmine University. His forthcoming book is "Craft-talk: On Writing Poetry."

Book Review
The Hatchet Buddha
By Rebecca Gayle Howell
Illustrations by Arwen Donahue
Larkspur Press; 47 pp. ; $24

Joseph Needham - the man who loved China

2008-06-14T23:40:00.000-07:00

Behind the Wall
By ALIDA BECKER
965 words
8 June 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
15
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

THE MAN WHO LOVED CHINA

The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom.

By Simon Winchester.

Illustrated. 316 pp. Harper/HarperCollins. $27.95.

On a winter evening in 1938, Joseph Needham, one of Cambridge University's most brilliant scientists -- and one of its most avid skirt-chasers -- lay in bed with a Chinese microbiologist who was also a colleague of Needham's extremely tolerant wife. Enjoying a post-coital cigarette, he asked her how its name might be rendered in Chinese. His diary records that she obliged by guiding him through the ideogram for ''fragrant smoke.'' Charmed, he instantly resolved to learn this fascinating language. It was the first step in a project that would absorb Needham until his death in 1995, turning him into one of the foremost Western authorities on China, dedicated to reminding the world that the Middle Kingdom's decline into backwardness and turmoil had been preceded by centuries of extraordinary creativity -- including crucial inventions like gunpowder, printing and the compass, all mistakenly thought to have originated elsewhere. The vehicle for these and countless other revelations was to be a work ''addressed,'' as Needham put it, ''to all educated people.'' The first volume of ''Science and Civilisation in China,'' published in 1954, has never gone out of print. Eighteen volumes were released during Needham's lifetime; there are now 24, with more still to come.

Despite its hyperbolic new subtitle (apparently the original, ''Joseph Needham and the Making of a Masterpiece,'' was considered too tame), Simon Winchester's biography, ''The Man Who Loved China,'' presents a low-key, often beguiling view of a man who hardly beguiled the postwar American authorities -- or, for a time, his own countrymen. A committed socialist and Communist sympathizer, Needham lent his authority to a dubiously documented investigation whose report, issued in 1952, concluded that the United States had used biological weapons in Manchuria and North Korea. Blacklisted by the Americans well into the 1970s and denounced for his political naivete by the British establishment, Needham retreated into the scholarly realm, where his accomplishments did much to restore his good name.

Cambridge had saved him once before, offering escape from the ''spectacularly disastrous Edwardian marriage'' of Needham's parents: a red-headed Irish spendthrift, fond of spiritualism and plate-throwing tantrums, and a solemn London doctor, who used the boy as an operating-room assistant. Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, called Noel by his father and Terence by his mother, took care to sign letters to each of his warring parents by the name they preferred. But at Cambridge this shy, introspective only child became someone else entirely -- the outgoing and seductive polymath Joseph. As Winchester demonstrated in his best-selling earlier book, ''The Professor and the Madman,'' he is fascinated by the quirks of genius. And Needham had plenty of quirks, both minor (breakfast toast must be burned black) and major (an ardent advocacy of nudism). ''Handsome, in a studious way,'' Needham spoke with ''a silkiness, almost a lisp'' and left few women free from his attentions. For almost 50 years, he kept both his wife and his Chinese mistress content, not only with him but with each other, even as he continued to play the field.

Winchester has spent a good deal of his career as a journalist in East Asia, so it's not surprising that the liveliest stretch of his narrative presents Needham's first encounter with the country whose language he had mastered from afar. Early in 1943, Needham was sent to China by the British Foreign Office, charged with organizing aid for Chinese scholars and scientists in flight from the Japanese invasion, who were attempting to re-establish their universities in the inner provinces. His travels over the next few years took him from the jungles of the Burmese border to the Gobi Desert and the seacoast of Fujian, on 11 expeditions that covered roughly 30,000 miles. He lived a life of grand adventure in wartime China, and Winchester presents its dangers and pleasures with panache. Whether Needham is donkey racing near ancient Buddhist caves or packed into a train full of refugees speeding across a soon-to-be-bombed railway bridge, the exhilaration of this part of his life is immediately engaging. And so are the colorful characters who come his way.

But if Winchester's account of these excursions seems faithful to Needham's character, some careless aspects of the narrative are less so. Do we need to be told twice within the space of three pages that Needham demanded a British boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics? Or reminded three times of his father's dictum ''No knowledge is ever wasted or to be despised?'' Isn't it odd that a map of China accompanying the World War II section should include as-yet-unborn nations like Pakistan, Bangladesh and North and South Korea? It's hard to imagine Needham, renowned for his photographic memory, countenancing such slips. Especially if you credit the story his wife used to tell about the period just before the publication of his three-volume treatise on chemical embryology: ''She recalled watching him lying awake in bed, mentally visualizing the book's page proofs, and then correcting in a notebook any errors or infelicities. Once this activity became too humdrum for him, she said, he further occupied himself by translating the selfsame pages from English into French, also in his head, and then correcting any errors that he fancied he could also see in this new translated text.''

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. By Pico Iyer

2008-05-02T20:47:00.000-07:00

A timely look at the life of the Dalai Lama
Askold Melnyczuk; Askold Melnyczuk recently published his third novel; "The House of Widows."
Askold Melnyczuk - Askold Melnyczuk recently published his third novel, "The House of Widows.". Boston Globe
743 words
16 April 2008
The Boston Globe
3
E.8
English
© 2008 New York Times Company. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.

BOOK REVIEW

The Open Road: The Global Journey

of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

By Pico Iyer Knopf, 275 pp, $24

These days, everyone has advice for the Dalai Lama: monks, former monks, ex-employees of various Free Tibet organizations, government officials from China, the European Union, and the United States. Moreover, he listens: Pico Iyer presents him as open, deeply curious, committed to truth even at the expense of doctrine. At the same time, he is a philosopher, with values rooted in age-old principles. Unless their counsel accords with the wisdom of Nagarjuna (a second-century Indian philosopher, and perhaps the most influential Buddhist thinker after Buddha himself), advice isn't likely to throw him off course. A genuine anomaly, a philosopher- king-democrat, the Dalai Lama takes the long view.

"Of all the many books and films that have brought the Dalai Lama and his people to the world," writes Iyer, "I'm not sure any of them has addressed that most central of questions": Has the Dalai Lama improved the lives of Tibetans?

In reflecting on this, Iyer has written one of the most thoughtful and eloquent books yet about the Dalai Lama. Considering his subject is one of the world's most analyzed and photographed men (and recently in the public eye after last month's riots in Tibet), that's no small feat. Iyer reminds us how little of the Dalai Lama we actually see. His public persona is grounded in four hours of daily meditation, as well as numerous esoteric rituals and practices: "Like any being, Tibetan Buddhism has a daylight side and a nighttime side, a part that belongs in the public, visible world and a part that belongs in the realm of dreams and premonitions and everything that exists outside the conscious mind." The Dalai Lama (real name: Tenzin Gyatso), notes Iyer, "[tends] to shield the wider world from the esoteric side of Tibetan Buddhism." Iyer reminds us that Tibetan culture is nearer to Shakespeare's, where "every comet or cloud formation is a direct message from the gods," than to our own.

As the secular head of state, Tenzin Gyatso reflects his studies in the school of Gandhi. What other political leaders approached their "enemies" by refusing to identify them as enemies? The Dalai Lama has turned his cheek so often he resembles one of those many- headed, thousand-armed deities in Tibetan iconography.

Part of the fascination of Iyer's account springs from the fact that he's had privileged access to the Dalai Lama. Iyer's father, a philosopher who studied at Oxford, befriended "the simple monk" shortly after his arrival in India in 1959. The monk's first gift to the 3-year-old Iyer was a photograph of himself seated on a throne at the Potala Palace in Lhasa. He was 5 years old at the time. Iyer's portrait presents the human being in all his poignant agony and grace.

So how successful has the Dalai Lama's approach been? On today's map, Tibet appears to be in China. At a recent gathering of the Tibetan diaspora in Boston, someone passed around a piece of Tibetan currency from before 1959. The aim was to let the young people assembled hold tangible proof giving the lie to China's claims. The bill represented another world, with its own discrete culture, laws, and values. It was not Chinese.

The assertion is both clear yet complex, partly because of the paradoxical nature of self and identity as they're presented by Buddhism. "I" and "self" are relative terms. Buddhism doesn't adapt easily to our lust for instant gratification. There are no mass conversions in Buddhism, no discount tickets to nirvana. It is also radically egalitarian: Every sentient being possesses the same spiritual potential. Asked what all his meetings with the world's leaders had achieved, the Dalai Lama replied: "One simple innocent sincere spiritual seeker - that's more important than a politician or a prime minister. When I see some result then I feel today I did some small contribution."

Reading that makes one hope the Dalai Lama's advisers are wise enough to ask for some in return.

Bringing buddhist principles to divorce counselling Pt.1

2008-05-02T20:34:00.000-07:00

Divorcing Well; Bringing Buddhist Pract ice to Divorce Counseling
Prend, Ashley Davis
4012 words
1 May 2008
Psychotherapy Networker
n/a
Volume 32; Issue 3; ISSN: 1535573X
English
Copyright (c) 2008 Psychotherapy Networker. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

Divorcing Well Bringing Buddhist Pract ice to Divorce Counseling

By Ashley Davis Prend

Divorcing well? Divorcing peacefully? Is such a thing even possible? Let's face it, divorce often generates mutual recrimination and fury, which can lead to ugly, expensive court battles, particularly when children are involved. During a divorce, both partners can become their own evil twins, more intent on inflicting punishment on each other than on ending their tattered marriage.

As counselors and family therapists, we want to spare our clients all this pain by preserving and improving their marriages. But when the marriage obviously can't be saved, many therapists focus on helping the partners achieve what's widely called a "good divorce": a split as humane, rational, and nondamaging as possible.

Increasingly, therapists recognize that even after a marriage ends, most couples continue to be linked together. While the death of a marriage is undoubtedly painful, it doesn't have to be pathological. If handled well, it can even become a rich opportunity for emotional and spiritual growth.

Yet, to a couple neck deep in the kind of reciprocal fury that only two people who once loved each other deeply can feel, the idea that their divorce could be an opportunity for transformation is as crazy as it is undesirable.

Is there any way to stop the antagonism? Beyond helping these self-declared enemies shed their feelings of anger and vengeance, is it possible to encourage them to be more openhearted and kindly toward each other? I've drawn six simple, uncomplicated steps from Buddhist philosophy to help hostile spouses cultivate a spirit of nonviolence, generosity, and compassion toward their ex-partners. Counterintuitive as it seems, practicing these steps can help people find the kind of inner wisdom and peace that acts as an antidote to their self-destructive and aggressive impulses.

Inherent in this approach is an expectation for people to connect with their higher nature--what Buddhists call their "Buddha-nature"--even when they're in pain. Using Buddhism as the backdrop for understanding the loss and transformation embedded in divorce, the process helps clients move past their knee-jerk emotions to a more enlightened place.

The six steps are:

1. Accept the Way Things Are

2. Choose the Road Less Traveled

3. See the Big Picture

4. Listen to Silence

5. Give Generously

6. Strive for Enlightenment

Taken together, they constitute a method that can create subtle internal shifts and powerful behavioral changes. While it's preferable for both partners to embark on them simultaneously, it isn't a prerequisite for doing divorce well. The client need not embrace Buddhism to benefit from this approach either.

Divorcing well doesn't mean that there'll be no conflict, pain, or challenging situations. It simply means that the divorcing couple, or one member of the couple, chooses to use the process for personal and spiritual growth, thereby launching them both on a healthier trajectory.

-------

I first met Ryan and Beth when they came in for marital therapy, shortly after their 10-year-old son had died of bone cancer. Understandably, they were devastated by their loss which, as is often the case, had exacerbated preexisting tensions in their marriage.

Ryan, a prominent doctor, spent many hours at work, and Beth had always complained that he was away from home too much, didn't help enough around the house or with the kids, was too tired to have sex, and didn't pay enough attention to her. Feeling overworked and underappreciated, Ryan retreated from what he perceived as Beth's harassment, responding with evasions, sullen silence, and even more distance.

Not surprisingly, they got little support from each other while mourning the loss of their son. Over several months, I helped them process their grief, but I couldn't do much to help them turn toward each other in their pain. When we ended our work together, I sensed a veil of bitterness still hanging between them. So, several years later, when Ryan returned alone for treatment and told me that Beth had asked for a divorce and full custody of their daughter, Hilary, I wasn't surprised.

Step 1: Accept the Way Things Are. What did surprise me was Ryan's adamant resistance to the divorce. He was fighting the legal process and feeling betrayed and belligerent. I think part of this was because, on some level, he had been satisfied with an emotionally distant, but stable and dependable, marriage. More than this, he feared change. Like many of us, he found it difficult to let go of old patterns, even if they'd brought him little happiness.

Ryan was active in a liberal Protestant church and found that the language and rituals of his faith were sustaining to him and yet . . . he was clearly open to learning from other spiritual paths. A central tenet of Buddhist teaching that immediately spoke to him was the Eastern perspective on change: the truth that nothing is permanent is not only understood and accepted by Buddhists, but actively embraced. Whether accepting or resisting it, change will continue to occur, and, therefore, they feel that rejecting this fundamental truth brings nothing but suffering. Conversely, accepting the inevitability of change brings peace and wisdom.

This is easier said than done, however, mainly because every change, especially a divorce, is, in essence, a little death, and human beings predictably react to death--and to endings--with anger and depression. The five stages of grief in response to death and dying first articulated by Elizabeth Ku¬bler-Ross--shock, anger, bargaining, de- pression, and acceptance--I believe apply to the divorce process. Anger is typically the most noticeable response to the grief generated by divorce.

Ryan felt betrayed by Beth's decision to leave the marriage, and angered by her aggressive steps against him. One day, he came into my office in a rage, and yelled, "She had the locks changed so I can't get into the house. Can you believe it?! I feel like breaking the door down. She had no right to change the locks without my consent."

I noticed that Ryan's breathing was shallow and his face was reddening. "Let's stop right now," I said. "I want you to tell me how your body is feeling. Just tune in for a minute, scan your body, and tell me what you notice."

He looked a bit confused but obliged and responded, "My chest feels tight."

"What about your breathing?" I prompted.

"Uhhhh, short . . . tense."

"Anything else?"

"My throat feels tight, too . . . and I'm hot. Is it hot in here?"

I then asked him to focus on his breath, following and counting each breath until his breathing was slower and steadier. Although it may seem odd to start a breathing exercise with a client who's obviously upset, I knew it would help calm him down.

I believe that deep, focused, slow breathing is one of therapy's greatest underused tools. Specialists working with panic-disordered or phobic individuals know how powerful deep breath work can be for calming the central nervous system.

Ryan isn't an angry person in general, and after he vented and used the breath to calm down, I explained to him that usually anger is an easier emotion to tolerate than pain, but that in reality, anger is a mask to cover the deeper emotions of grief and despair.

I pointed out that one thing that was so frustrating for Ryan regarding the changed locks was that he wasn't in control of the situation. When I asked him when he'd felt that way before, I knew the question would lead him back to his son's death, and that mourning the death of his marriage was retriggering his grief for his child.

Life as Ryan had known it was over. Accepting this ending, this profound and irrevocable change in his life, was the key psychological task facing him. I suggested that he start to integrate into his days a physical practice of letting go and accepting reality, no matter how painful. One way of doing this is a simple breathing technique of internally chanting a word on the in-breath and another on the out-breath. I asked Ryan to inhale the word let and exhale the word go.

He found that doing the chant when he felt mounting tension helped calm him down. Such a simple technique hardly seems powerful or grandiose enough to help people do something as monumental as accept change. Yet it releases the tight physical grasp we keep on ourselves--on our desires and expectations for the way we think things should be--and helps our minds and bodies flow with life's natural rhythms.

After a few weeks of conscious breathing whenever something seemed out of control and upsetting, Ryan found that his feelings of rage at Beth and sense of betrayal began to abate.

Step 2: Choose the Road Less Traveled. Once clients begin to feel themselves accepting reality as it unfolds, they need to choose how to accept it. One option is to accept what's happened with bitterness, animosity, and a determination to punish the ex-spouse. The road less traveled, however, is a commitment to cooperation, a decision by spouses to put the children's needs above their own, and a desire to maintain a healthy relationship with each other.

While Ryan had decided to take the road less traveled, he found that staying on it was the challenge. At first, things progressed smoothly. After attending a court-mandated "Kids First" seminar required in most states for divorcing couples, he seemed enthusiastic about trying out what he'd learned: that couples shouldn't insult their ex, fight in front of the children, or use the children as pawns

Pt 2.

2008-05-02T20:32:00.000-07:00

However, Beth's ongoing antagonism began to erode his commitment to that path. For instance, she undermined their visiting agreements regarding Hilary, and then sent sarcastic e-mails accusing him of not caring about his daughter. Ryan fell into every trap, easily taking her bait and repeatedly arguing with her and being nasty.

I asked, "Do you like who you become when you relate to Beth?"

"No, she brings out the worst in me," he said.

"Or rather, you let her. You know," I added, "If one person changes the dance steps in a relationship, the entire dance pattern begins to change, maybe not at first, but certainly over time."

So he and I began to experiment with ways that he could change the dance. I asked him to preface his remarks to Beth differently: to start every sentence with a kind phrase and then bridge it with a however. For example, his wife had agreed in mediation to refrain from scheduling appointments for their daughter during "his" time, but she invariably forgot. Rather than just blow up at her, he said, "I know it must be frustrating to try to schedule this dentist appointment when your work schedule is so packed. However, we agreed that you'd schedule this type of appointment on "your" time. I've already made other plans for that day, and so I won't be able to take her to the appointment."

What begins to happen when people really work with this step is that they find that taking the peaceful path becomes gradually less difficult and more natural; it becomes not so much a question of trying hard as of just being.

Step 3: See the Big Picture. Seeing the big picture means gaining perspective and realizing that any event or period of time, including divorce, is only one piece of the overall puzzle of their lives. While clients may believe that their situation is dire or intolerable, we can help them expand their frame of reference by having them imagine what things might look like in 5 or 10 years.

In trying to help Ryan gain perspective on his situation, I asked him to write a list of 10 things that were better about his divorced life than his married life. He was able to think of 20 things, including not getting yelled at every night when he came home, not being criticized for being unaffectionate, enjoying his one-on-one time with his daughter, and being able to watch football on the weekend without being hassled. His new life was perhaps more complicated as a divorced man, but it clearly had its upside.

Becoming aware of improvements in his life was part of Ryan's healing, but "seeing the big picture" can also include a farther reaching vision. According to the Buddhist concept of rebirth, Ryan and Beth were joined in working out the vast moral law of causation, or karma. The main point of karma is that every human life is part of a vast, inconceivably complex pattern.

Ryan was able to see that, even though his union with Beth had been unhappy, it had produced two wonderful children who were absolutely meant to be born. Furthermore, his son's life and death had influenced many people and continued to do so through a scholarship legacy in his name. By engaging in this exercise, he could glimpse the idea that he didn't make a mistake in marrying Beth, but that both the marriage and divorce were part of an endless process of learning and growing.

Because it's often so hard to gain this long view when caught up in the emotional turmoil of the immediate, I frequently ask clients to write a letter to their future self--say, their self in five years--describing their current troubles and asking for guidance from this future, presumably wiser, self.

His future self assured him that Beth would calm down, find a new man, and stop pestering him so much. Not only that, but he'd meet a nice woman. Ryan found this letter-writing quite amusing and fun to do. It helped him see that life is full of chapters and that reality has many unseen and unimagined dimensions.

Step 4: Listen to Silence. Trying to stay true to a higher intention of integrity, strength, and cooperation in the face of daily emotional upheavals is no easy task. If people don't take the time to tune in to a quieter, inner voice of wisdom, they're sure to be thrown off track by the tide of external pressures. A daily, or at least regular, practice of sitting mindfully in silence allows us to be in the moment without judging it or ourselves, without trying to control or change anything--which has a deeply calming and centering effect on the mind and body.

When I suggest sitting in silence, many people are nonplussed. Are they just supposed to sit and think about their to-do list or what they're going to make for dinner? While there are many different styles of meditation that may focus on an image, a mantra, or a breathing technique, I recommend a simple meditation practice that I call "ABC," which incorporates several key elements. One should spend up to 10 minutes on each letter, moving sequentially from A to B to C.

A. Be Aware of the mindful moment: listen to the sounds around you, feel your body on the chair, scan your body for tension, notice the air temperature on your skin, watch your mind naturally jump from thought to thought, labeling the process "thinking."

B. Breathe: notice the breath moving in and out of the body, and how the body pauses between each in- and out-breath, observing the process, or literally counting the breaths.

C. Center: let your attention drop into the center of your body and imagine a vertical core of light within yourself, connecting to this centered, anchored place. I suggest that clients repeat a word, a mantra --perhaps peace or love--as a way of focusing the mind and staying in the core space.

Ryan was extremely resistant to the idea of formal meditation. Although we tried the ABC technique in my office, he found it difficult to still his body and focus his mind, and felt anxious in a process that made him feel as though he was "doing nothing." So I suggested that he try a walking meditation.

He committed to taking a 20-minute walk several times a week in his local woods. We discussed how to make it not just an ordinary stroll, but a focused walk, a mindful activity, a contemplative act.

I suggested that he notice every sound, step, and smell in acute heightened detail. And when his attention turned to his thoughts and feelings, I said he should try to let them pass like clouds across a clear sky. So, when he had a negative thought about Beth, such as "She's so annoying. I wish she'd quit harassing me for more money," he might take a deep breath and let the thought pass. This habit of detached observation made him feel more centered and less hooked by his thoughts.

His walking meditations gave him "big picture" help, too, since he realized that his squabbles were pretty irrelevant to the woods around him.

Step 5: Give Generously. This step can be the hardest for people who are feeling hurt or angry. Why should they be generous to this jerk, this creep, this lying, no-good spouse? Well, because being generous is what will free them from their own bitterness.

According to the Buddhist Law of Karma, whatever you put out in the world will return to you tenfold. This same wise message is found repeatedly throughout time, in our own culture: "What goes around, comes around," "As ye sow, so shall ye reap," and even the Golden Rule as taught by Jesus: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

But how do we help our divorcing couples rise above their feelings of righteous anger, even hatred? In Buddhism, one of the principle meditative techniques for achieving a state of generosity is called the metta bhavana or just metta, the practice of loving-kindness. This practice is fivefold:

1. Direct loving-kindness toward yourself

2. Direct loving-kindness toward a loved one

3. Direct loving-kindness toward a stranger

4. Direct loving-kindness toward an enemy or someone with whom you're having difficulty

5. Direct loving-kindness outward toward your larger community, your world

And as you go through each of the 5 stages, you say or think phrases such as:

"May you be happy."

"May you be safe."

"May you be healthy."

"May you be peaceful."

Metta is the great equalizer because it binds us all to the most common denominator of human yearning: the desire to be happy, loved, and protected.

When I first described metta to Ryan, he laughed and said, "You've got to be kidding! She'd sooner see me dead on the street than wish me well!"

"It doesn't matter what she wishes for you," I replied. "Metta is about opening your own heart. The benefit is for you."

I asked him to commit to trying the practice every day for 21 days--the time necessary, I've heard, for a new habit to take hold. When I asked, "What have you got to lose?" he agreed.

He decided to practice metta in the car, using red lights as his reminder to offer a loving-kindness phrase. While he found it easy to offer metta feelings toward himself, a friend, a stranger, and the world, he always got stuck when he came to Beth. So in the beginning, he simply thought toward her, "I wish you to be less hostile." I asked him to repeat that during his stoplight mettas. The next week, I asked him "What metta phrase for Beth would you like to work with this week?" And he came up with "I don't wish you sickness."

The next week, I asked him to imagine some of the challenges that Beth was encountering in her life--to try to see life from her perspective. He found he could feel her concern about having to have a root canal and understand that she was stressed about a mutual friend's serious illness. His view began to soften as he saw through her eyes, and he agreed to offer an empathic metta phrase in positive language, "I wish you health."

Although it may seem silly to those who bank on logical and reasoned interventions, in a sense, metta is an exercise that bypasses the brain altogether, going straight to the heart. Ryan found as he worked with metta that his entire inner experience began to shift, and with it, his actions. One afternoon, for example, when he brought Hilary back to Beth's house, he found the front walkway covered with the snow. Almost without thinking, he grabbed a shovel from the garage and started shoveling the walkway and steps to the door.

Step 6: Strive for Enlightenment. When the Buddha sat meditating under the Bodhi tree circa 500 B.C., it's said that he finally reached enlightenment--"awakened" to the Truth--realizing that he was connected to all things and that any sense of separation between himself and others was an illusion. Based on this discovery, he concluded that there's no such thing as an enemy, since everyone is truly connected.

In other words, enlightenment is the deep realization that we're all involved in a rich and complex network of relationships that extends to every living being on the planet. Thinking about an ex-spouse (and even a new partner) this way provides a context for unity rather than division, and opens the way to developing a cooperative relationship.

For Ryan, trying to hold onto the fact that Beth was the mother of his children helped him remember that she'd always have a special role in his life. He further realized that if he talked poorly about Beth to his daughter, he was essentially insulting half of her gene pool, half of her heritage. This point was driven home to Ryan when he saw an art project of Hilary's entitled "My Family": a colorful drawing of Ryan, Beth, herself, and her brother in a cloud in heaven, along with the family dog.

It's hard to be hateful to someone when you know that you're connected in profound ways. And it's also hard to fight with someone when he or she won't fight back. Do Ryan and Beth have an easy, relaxed friendship now? Well no, not always. Ryan continues to see me every other month, just to check in and review interactions with his ex. Staying on the peaceful path is a journey that requires regular vigilance and support.

The last time he was at Beth's house to pick up Hilary for the weekend, they began to discuss the next summer's vacation and camp plans. Ryan knew this had been a sticking point in the past, and he didn't feel they could or should discuss this casually. He suggested that they find a time in the near future to work out the details so that they'd both be comfortable with the arrangements. Beth agreed.

And then Beth said, "You know, Ryan, I pray for you at night."

"How did you respond?" I asked.

"I told her thanks, and I pray for you, too."

Ashley Davis Prend, L.C.S.W., A.C.S.W., is a psychotherapist and grief counselor in private practice in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She's the author of Transcending Loss and Claim Your Inner Grown-Up. She's also the cohost of the mental health radio program Heart to Heart on Portsmouth Community Radio. Contact: ashleydprend@comcast.net.

Searching for the Dalai Lama by Holly Morris

2008-04-08T00:51:00.001-07:00

Book Review Desk; SECTBR
Searching for the Dalai Lama
By HOLLY MORRIS
1263 words
6 April 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
12
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

THE OPEN ROAD

The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

By Pico Iyer.

275 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.

Do you get the impression that the Dalai Lama is not exactly the brightest bulb in the room?'' a journalist asked Pico Iyer after both men left a speaking event by His Holiness. We know what he's getting at. At a certain angle, the chirpy aphorisms, the generous stream of book forewords, the Hollywood entourage, all conspire to cast a hue of superficiality that few global pop icons escape.

In that light, it is possible to forget that the Dalai Lama is, in fact, a titan: a head of state, a doctor of metaphysics, a prolific author, a hyperrealist, a newshound, a godhead to the Tibetan people and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize -- a man who embodies a ''simplicity that lies not before complexity but on the far side of it.''

In ''The Open Road,'' Iyer takes a long, hard look at the many meanings of this deceptively simple man. At first blush, one might wonder why Iyer, best known as the author of many travel memoirs including ''Video Night in Kathmandu'' and ''Sun After Dark,'' would take on such a subject. The answer lies in the understanding that Iyer is not just a travel writer, and the Dalai Lama is not just a monk.

Iyer has set out to examine Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, as a part of a larger set of ideas and thinkers -- a towering example of the cross-cultural interconnectedness that has been the author's particular subject. Iyer has long wondered ''how globalism could acquire depths, an inwardness that would sustain it more than mere goods or data could.'' And ''if our new way of living were to offer any real sustenance,'' he posits, ''it would have to be invisible, in the realm of what underlies acceleration and multinationals.''

Confused? Me too. A bit. But that's O.K., because when you have a formidable writer who says I'm curious, catch me if you can, and a subject as rich as the Dalai Lama, it's best to just hang on for the ride.

Iyer's connection to his subject is also deeply personal. His father, a Bombay-raised Indian teaching political philosophy at Oxford, went to Dharamsala, India, to meet Gyatso in 1960, when both men were in their 20s, only a year after the Tibetan leader had fled to India ahead of his Chinese pursuers; the men started a lifelong friendship. Iyer himself first traveled to the Dalai Lama's home as a teenager, and thus began a dialogue that would cover three decades and half a dozen continents -- and become the grist of ''The Open Road.'' Weaving together these conversations (and many with the Dalai Lama's brother, Ngari Rinpoche, and other Tibetans), along with vast research, Iyer has written an original exploration that occasionally loses the scent and wanders off trail, but largely delivers a trenchant, impassioned look at a singular life.

Right off, Iyer lays out the many paradoxes of a figure he considers one of the best- and least-known people on the planet. The Dalai Lama is a religious teacher who warns of the entanglements of religion and urges people to stay with their original faiths. He is a dedicated man of science, yet beholden to hundreds of religious rites. He continues to urge a controversial forbearance (rather than direct action) toward the Chinese, even as occupied Tibet is a whisper away from gone. He is a head of state, with all the attendant duties, who meditates for four hours every morning on, among other things, the roots of compassion and his own death. In what other person does this depth of monasticism and plenitude of frequent-flier miles so live together? Iyer doesn't solve the conundrums; he digs toward the nature of what lies below. One man is not likely to have all the answers, he writes of the Dalai Lama, but -- and here, Iyer could be addressing his own narrative -- ''it's the questions he puts into play that invigorate.''

The Dalai Lama is, above all, what we want him to be. The Western world most wants him to be a fairy tale -- a saffron-robed young leader from Shangri-La, where we think a hunk of spirituality is tossed in with every drought of hot butter tea. To the Tibetan people, he is regarded as a god, but to the outside world he is ''a secular divinity of sorts, and for that there is less precedent.'' Iyer challenges us to see him as one of a group of agents of transformation like Vaclav Havel, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, people who ''change the world by changing the way they looked at the world.''

But the accessible Dalai Lama, whose voice can be downloaded as a ring tone and who crisscrosses the globe with a populist message of compassion and kindness, is only a part of who he is. He is mostly, and radically, a private man. We do not see, nor would most of us understand if we did, the vast esoteric side of Buddhism -- a complex world of oracles, ancient enmities and high-level metaphysical pay dirt -- that he also inhabits. As a monk, of course, the Dalai Lama spends much of his life steeped in the central Buddhist tenet of interconnectedness, engaged in inner work that supports, and even creates, new outward realities.

Case in point: Dharamsala. The creation of the Tibetan government and community-in-exile there is a hopeful experiment, ''as compressed and bittersweet an image of the global village as I have ever seen,'' Iyer tells us. With Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama envisioned a new, improved Tibet, doing away with many of the feudalisms and formalities of old and successfully building a refuge for, and incubator of, Tibetan culture. Iyer describes it as a remote outpost of searing spirit, entrenched longing and ramshackle reality. A place, above all, ''consecrated to the idea that the problems of one place are the concerns of every place, in our ever more linked universe.''

The Dalai Lama's commitment to modernize led, in 2001, to exiles in 37 countries electing the first Tibetan prime minister. There was a minor uproar when he included in Tibet's new constitution a clause for his own impeachment. And he has suggested he could be the last Dalai Lama. All this planned obsolescence makes Tibetans uncomfortable, but it makes sense in light of the six words into which he distills Buddhism: ''Change is part of the world.''

And what of Tibet itself? As recent events have shown, it's hard to feel optimistic. The country teeters dangerously close to extinction by absorption. But Iyer tells us the Dalai Lama rests his faith on surprise, ''the sudden result of what has been building invisibly for years.'' We are reminded that the Berlin Wall came down seemingly overnight (just as it went up); one day apartheid simply seemed to collapse; butterfly wings, as the notion goes, can cause a tsunami to rise up on the other side of the world. ''Until the last moment,'' the Dalai Lama says, ''anything is possible.''

PHOTO: His Holiness the Dalai Lama at the Gyume Tantric Monastery, Kamataka, India, Jan. 6, 1998. Photograph by Richard Avedon. (PHOTOGRAPH $; 2008 THE RICHARD AVEDON FOUNDATION)

Holly Morris is the author of ''Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine.''

Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley

2008-03-04T23:23:00.000-08:00

Books
This is your brain on a new track
Caroline Leavitt; Caroline Leavitt is the author of "Girls in Trouble." She can be reached at carolineleavitt.com.
Caroline Leavitt - Caroline Leavitt is the author of "Girls in Trouble." She can be reached at carolineleavitt.com. Boston Globe
970 words
3 February 2008
The Boston Globe
3
C.5
English
© 2008 New York Times Company. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.

BOOK REVIEW / Self-Help

Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves
By Sharon Begley
Ballantine, 304 pp., paperback, $14.95
Super Brain: 101 Easy Ways to a More Agile Mind

By Carol Vorderman

Gotham, 288 pp., paperback, $15
How Can I Talk If My Lips Don't Move?: Inside My Autistic Mind
By Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay
Arcade, 238 pp., $25

If you're like me, you probably exercise and eat right to keep your body healthy and buff. But what have you done for your brain lately?

For years, scientists have insisted that when it comes to the brain, we're hard-wired to do certain things in certain ways, and as we age, things like memory, hearing, and mood degenerate. Or do they? Neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to grow neurons and rewire itself, was once thought to be impossible. But in the fascinating "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain," Sharon Begley delves into a new science that is disproving much of what we thought we knew about the brain.

Begley, science columnist for Newsweek, begins with a little history. In 2004, prominent scientists joined with the Dalai Llama at the Mind and Life Institute to investigate how we can indeed change our very brains, grow new neurons, and increase gray matter just by changing our ways of thinking and responding to stimuli. Buddhist monks and ordinary people were asked to meditate, and it was found that this practice permanently changed the chemical structure of the brain, particularly in areas that had to do with happiness and contentment. Most interestingly, the monks' brains continued to show this difference even when they were not meditating, much the way a new muscle, built up from exercise, will remain.

In another study, obsessive-compulsive patients were asked to meditate, reminding themselves that their thoughts did not mirror reality. When PET scans were done on their brains afterward, there were changes in the areas related to obsessive behavior, proof that the brain can be stimulated to build important new circuitry.

What's even more enthralling is Begley's fascinating glimpses of what's ahead. By "repeatedly changing the sensory input" received, a dyslexic brain can begin to read easily, and memory loss might be something that can be worked off the same way a few extra pounds are.

The perfect companion book is "Super Brain: 101 Easy Ways to a More Agile Mind," by Carol Vorderman. Vorderman is famous on British TV, known for both her sudoku finesse and her ability to memorize incredibly long series of numbers. Billed as a fitness handbook for the mind, "Super Brain" includes tips, recommended foods, and strategies to get your brain in optimum shape.

Divided into three sections, the book is a cornucopia of easy and fun exercises. You can boost focus by concentrating on a watch's second hand for two whole seconds (harder than it sounds) or stimulate your memory (studies have shown that remembering pushes the brain to lay down new connections) with a series of fascinating facts. Vorderman shows how breaking habits - even drinking from a different coffee cup in the morning - can change your brain, and how music can boost brain power the same way that whole grains, fresh veggies, and lots of sleep can. The book is really your own personal trainer, able to be opened anywhere, at any time.

But if the workings of the so-called normal brain are under investigation, what about the brain that is outside the norm? A lot has been written about autism, a good amount of it implying that the autistic person is locked away from us, barraged by sensory overload. Prepare to be astonished, because much of that appears wrong.

"How Can I Talk If My Lips Don't Move?: Inside My Autistic Mind," by Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, should, to my mind, be required reading for any parents struggling with a diagnosis of autism for their child, or for any professional wanting to help. Hurry past the clinical foreword by the director of the Autism Research Foundation and dive into Mukhopadhyay's insights on his condition. He explains why he screams at length (to focus and stop sensory overload) and how he is able to solve many of his own problems without the help of professionals.

Autistic people tend to be obsessive, and he cures his fear of the power going out by giving himself the constant visual clue of fans whirring in every room. Writing gives him control of his world and a way to communicate, an "impossible" feat he began when he was 6. Helped along by his extraordinary mother, who insists that "people need to believe you," he diligently practices his writing and allows doctors to test him, and he soon becomes so famous, he's the subject of an award-winning documentary. When patronizingly told he's done a "good job" at some task, he snipes, "Do they not know that I have two books published and one translated into German?"

Struggling against stereotypes, Mukhopadhyay argues that he is not "sick," as autistic people often are classified, and he rails against anyone thinking him less of a person because he's autistic. Brave, bold, and deeply felt, this book shows that much we might have believed about autism can be wrong.

"What is a mind but a mysterious possession?" Mukhopadhyay writes, but as these three books show, the scope and power of our brains are just beginning to be discovered.

Past Lives of the Buddha - Wat Si Chum: Art, Architecture and Inscriptions. Editor Peter Skilling

2008-01-26T22:21:00.000-08:00

PAGE TURNERS; PIECES OF WRITTEN HISTORY
521 words
27 January 2008
Bangkok Post
O5
English
(c) 2008

The secrets of Wat Si Chum in Sukhothai are tackled in new book

KRITTIYA WONGTAVAVIMARN

Past Lives of the Buddha - Wat Si Chum - Art, Architecture and Inscriptions describes the unique character and value of Wat Si Chum, one of the main monastic sites located northwest of Sukhothai and outside the city wall.

Wat Si Chum has been an object of fascination for several generations of scholars. The large mondop - a largely unadorned masonry cube with no windows and a single entrance - which dominates the site has no exact replica elsewhere in Sukhothai, Si Satchanalai or Kamphaeng Phet. The plain exterior, however, conceals mysteries: When was this unique structure built - by whom and why? Why was the site chosen? Was the temple ever completed or is it unfinished? If the latter is the case, why was it left unfinished?

The size of its Buddha image is exceptional and its captioned jataka (former lives of Gautama Buddha) carvings are as unique as its interior corridors and stairways.

Sukhothai Inscription No. 2, as the inscriptions have been named, found inside a staircase, has confronted epigraphists with insoluble difficulties. Many doubts remain unsolved: What is the significance of the 86 inscribed stone reliefs depicting jatakas, which are among the earliest surviving examples of Thai figural and narrative art, and are inscribed with one of the earliest series of inscriptions in the Thai language? How many jatakas did the founders of the temple intend to depict? Why are the jataka slabs placed where they are? Is this their original position?

The puzzles it poses have generated lively and sometimes acrimonious debate. But to date no sustained study of its art, design and inscriptions has been attempted. This book presents the latest evidence and proposes a new interpretation with the first-ever English translation of the inscriptions and photographs of the reliefs supplemented by 19th-century jataka paintings from Wat Khrua Wan in Bangkok.

It also includes essays on all aspects of the temple and a discussion of the significance of jatakas in international Buddhist literature, art and ideology.

The book devoted to Wat Si Chum is the first multidisciplinary study to advance knowledge of the ancient Kingdom and to inspire similar studies of other monuments to the understanding of the complex culture of Sukhothai.

A Sanskrit and Pali scholar, Peter Skilling edited this book with four other scholars: Pattaratorn Chirapravati, a historian of Southeast Asian art and now assistant professor of Asian art and director of the Asian Studies Programme at California State University; Pierre Pichard, an architect with L'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient for over 30 years; Prapod Assavavirulhakarn, assistant professor and head of the Department of Eastern Languages at Chulalongkorn University; and Santi Pakdeekham, a lecturer in the Department of Thai and Oriental Languages at Srinakarinwirot University.

Past Lives of the Buddha -- Wat Si Chum _ Art, Architecture and Inscriptions

Edited by Peter Skilling, Pattaratorn Chirapravati, Pierre Pichard, Prapod Assavavirulhakarn and Santi Pakdeekham

River Books, 296 pages with 390 colour illustrations and 30 plans and maps.

2,550 baht at all leading book shops.

ISBN 978-9749863459

The Clash - Samuel Huntington

2008-01-17T02:44:00.000-08:00

Book Review Desk; SECT7
The Clash
By FOUAD AJAMI
1272 words
6 January 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
10
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

It would have been unlike Samuel P. Huntington to say ''I told you so'' after 9/11. He is too austere and serious a man, with a legendary career as arguably the most influential and original political scientist of the last half century -- always swimming against the current of prevailing opinion.

In the 1990s, first in an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs, then in a book published in 1996 under the title ''The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,'' he had come forth with a thesis that ran counter to the zeitgeist of the era and its euphoria about globalization and a ''borderless'' world. After the cold war, he wrote, there would be a ''clash of civilizations.'' Soil and blood and cultural loyalties would claim, and define, the world of states.

Huntington's cartography was drawn with a sharp pencil. It was ''The West and the Rest'': the West standing alone, and eight civilizations dividing the rest -- Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese. And in this post-cold-war world, Islamic civilization would re-emerge as a nemesis to the West. Huntington put the matter in stark terms: ''The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other's Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.''

Those 19 young Arabs who struck America on 9/11 were to give Huntington more of history's compliance than he could ever have imagined. He had written of a ''youth bulge'' unsettling Muslim societies, and young Arabs and Muslims were now the shock-troops of a new radicalism. Their rise had overwhelmed the order in their homelands and had spilled into non-Muslim societies along the borders between Muslims and other peoples. Islam had grown assertive and belligerent; the ideologies of Westernization that had dominated the histories of Turkey, Iran and the Arab world, as well as South Asia, had faded; ''indigenization'' had become the order of the day in societies whose nationalisms once sought to emulate the ways of the West.

Rather than Westernizing their societies, Islamic lands had developed a powerful consensus in favor of Islamizing modernity. There was no ''universal civilization,'' Huntington had observed; this was only the pretense of what he called ''Davos culture,'' consisting of a thin layer of technocrats and academics and businessmen who gather annually at that watering hole of the global elite in Switzerland.

In Huntington's unsparing view, culture is underpinned and defined by power. The West had once been pre-eminent and militarily dominant, and the first generation of third-world nationalists had sought to fashion their world in the image of the West. But Western dominion had cracked, Huntington said. Demography best told the story: where more than 40 percent of the world population was ''under the political control'' of Western civilization in the year 1900, that share had declined to about 15 percent in 1990, and is set to come down to 10 percent by the year 2025. Conversely, Islam's share had risen from 4 percent in 1900 to 13 percent in 1990, and could be as high as 19 percent by 2025.

It is not pretty at the frontiers between societies with dwindling populations -- Western Europe being one example, Russia another -- and those with young people making claims on the world. Huntington saw this gathering storm. Those young people of the densely populated North African states who have been risking all for a journey across the Strait of Gibraltar walk right out of his pages.

Shortly after the appearance of the article that seeded the book, Foreign Affairs magazine called upon a group of writers to respond to Huntington's thesis. I was assigned the lead critique. I wrote my response with appreciation, but I wagered on modernization, on the system the West had put in place. ''The things and ways that the West took to 'the rest,''' I wrote, ''have become the ways of the world. The secular idea, the state system and the balance of power, pop culture jumping tariff walls and barriers, the state as an instrument of welfare, all these have been internalized in the remotest places. We have stirred up the very storms into which we now ride.'' I had questioned Huntington's suggestion that civilizations could be found ''whole and intact, watertight under an eternal sky.'' Furrows, I observed, run across civilizations, and the modernist consensus would hold in places like India, Egypt and Turkey.

Huntington had written that the Turks -- rejecting Mecca, and rejected by Brussels -- would head toward Tashkent, choosing a pan-Turkic world. My faith was invested in the official Westernizing creed of Kemalism that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had bequeathed his country. ''What, however, if Turkey redefined itself?'' Huntington asked. ''At some point, Turkey could be ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar pleading for membership in the West and to resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.''

Nearly 15 years on, Huntington's thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time. In recent years, for example, the edifice of Kemalism has come under assault, and Turkey has now elected an Islamist to the presidency in open defiance of the military-bureaucratic elite. There has come that ''redefinition'' that Huntington prophesied. To be sure, the verdict may not be quite as straightforward as he foresaw. The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels: in that European shelter, the Islamists shrewdly hope they can find protection against the power of the military.

''I'll teach you differences,'' Kent says to Lear's servant. And Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism's conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)

I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are ''nowhere men,'' children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.

More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington's pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West -- openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is ''dubious'' whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history's passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington's that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.

PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY LYNSEY ADDARIO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Fouad Ajami is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the author, most recently, of ''The Foreigner's Gift.''

Deepak on Buddha

2007-12-01T20:23:00.000-08:00

The making of the Buddha
SHEILA KUMAR
775 words
2 December 2007
The Hindu
03
English
(c) 2007 Kasturi & Sons Ltd

Spirituality

A gentle reader on the life of the Enlightened One.

Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, Deepak Chopra, HarperCollins; Rs 395.

Deepak Chopra, not in the least burdened by his New Age Guru label, has gone and written a book on the early life of Siddhartha who becomes Gautama, who, in turn, becomes the Buddha. No preaching, no lecturing, just an interesting story told in a measured manner and at a measured pace. However, for all that, eventually the book does become a primer for those wanting to know something about Buddhism. Chopra states clearly in the author’s note that he wanted to flesh out the character of this famous but very obscure (his words) person. So, that’s what he sets out to do, in a style reminiscent of T.H. White’s classic on King Arthur The Once and Future King. This here is the Buddha myth in deconstructed form, complete with a last chapter that tells neophytes how to attain some amount of Buddha-hood.

Make no mistake, though, the book is quite an interesting read. The story Chopra tells has always held universal appeal, that of the young, handsome prince who gives up a life of privilege and becomes a monk, practising severe austerities till he finally attains enlightenment … and this part is really well written. En route, though, the aspirant has small epiphanies that enlighten both him and us: that things which really mean so much are as thin and fragile as tissue; that if you think you are mighty, that’s all that counts, because no one is really mighty.

Siddhartha’s father, the warrior king Suddhodana, (fear is protection; use fear like medicine, he cautions, just enough to be a remedy but not so much that it becomes poison) is well fleshed out, though Queen Maya makes only a guest appearance. The demon Mara in his numerous face-offs with the Buddha before he becomes the Buddha, of course, is evocatively etched, a truly frightening look at pain, temptation and power. A demon’s work is to amplify the mind’s suffering, Chopra tells us, and goes on to give ample evidence of the same, whether Mara is testing Siddhartha or Devadatta, another interesting character as we encounter him in this book. At one point, in a flash of pure brilliance, Devadatta realises that “the gods don’t exist. But when the horror of life finally reveals itself, somebody has to invent gods”.

Path to enlightenment

And so, despite the king’s desperate efforts, Siddhartha gets to encounter sickness, ageing and death, which sets him on the path to renunciation. He goes into an abyss and returns, having left fear behind. His hunger for a guru is all too palpable; he meets and attempts to learn from several enigmatic savants before moving on. And the reader soon sees that in his enlightenment lay Gautama’s refuge. In fact, Gautama admits to wanting to be loved for the saint he knew himself to be, to inspire others to join him in his work. He is surprised that he will need words; he had hoped to heal the world with a touch or by simply existing in it.

This is the Buddha as the world knows him. The man who agonised over every aspect of hurt and pain. Whose compassion for everything and anything was all-encompassing, whose evolution was slow, very slow. His belief in the Buddha inside every person. His journey from zealot to the truly detached one. Even his take on the fight between good and evil is inspired, as is his first test after becoming the Buddha, the taming of Angulimala. The temptation of the Buddha here is none other than his wife Yashodara, a temptation he puts behind him with almost insulting ease.

This writer’s only beef is there isn’t much emotional resonance; we see Buddha as emotional, yes, endearing, well, no. Then again, you do take some stuff away from this book. Chopra talks of how people deal with fear by turning it into rage. How karma is just the memory of past pleasure we want to repeat and past pain we want to avoid. So okay, the book does need polishing and there is no real empathy built up between the Buddha and the reader, but no matter. As a primary Buddha reader, it serves its purpose very well. At one point Chopra calls his reader as one who might be coming to Buddha from the cold…if that is the case, this book is not the worst place to begin.

The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan by Duncan

2007-10-05T19:52:00.001-07:00

The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan
Rocha, Cristina
1012 words
1 October 2007
Philosophy East & West
599
Volume 57; Issue 4; ISSN: 00318221
English
© 2007 Philosophy East & West. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.

The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan. By Duncan Ryuken Williams. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. 241. Hardcover $52.50.

Zen Buddhism has fascinated the West for a long time. The Zen boom of the 1960s was a key moment in the dissemination of this Japanese Buddhist school in popular culture. As a rule, books on Zen have focused on remarkable monks and their feats, monasticism, and studies of doctrine. Furthermore, Zen schools have been studied in isolation, separated from other Japanese Buddhist schools and non-Buddhist religions, as if they were not part of the social and religious life of Japan. However, more recently, some studies have begun to focus on another aspect of Zen-the everyday customs, beliefs, and rituals of ordinary Buddhists and temples. Following in the footsteps of William Bodiford and Bernard Faure, Duncan Williams, in The Other Side of Zen, has written a fascinating account of the extraordinary expansion of the Soto Zen sect in Tokugawa Japan by looking at Soto Zen involvement in all aspects of the religious economy of the period.

Drawing on new historical sources that have become available in the past twenty-five years (such as temple histories and logbooks, prayer and funerary manuals, sales records of talismans and medicine, death registries, diaries of pilgrims, and letters of villagers, temple priests, and government officials) as well as analyzing legends, miracle tales and ghost stories, and material culture such as tombstones and stone markers, Williams has drawn a comprehensive portrait of ''what Soto Zen actually was, as lived by ordinary priests and laypeople'' (p. 3). He shows that for the great majority of ordinary Soto Zen monks and parishioners, the Zen temple was a place for funerary and memorial rituals, festivals, physical healing (with exclusive Soto medicine and talismans), and faith healing (through the worship of deities). According to Williams, they never practiced sitting (zazen), never engaged in reciting koans, or read Dogen's writings (p. 3). Like Steven Covell in Japanese Temple Buddhism: Worldliness in a Religion of Renunciation (University of Hawai'i Press, 2005), which explores the everyday-life aspects of contemporary temple Buddhism, Williams does not condemn the lack of these monastic practices, which became synonymous with ''true'' Zen in the West (many Westerners have argued that Zen has degenerated in Japan). On the contrary, he argues that this very engagement with laypeople's religious needs has contributed to the vitality of the Soto sect, making it the largest Buddhist sect of the Tokugawa period.

Williams' efforts in decentering the study of Zen by shifting his attention from famous monks and doctrine to ordinary Buddhists and their behavior have a clear origin in the study of social history exemplified by the work of the French Annales School (1928- ). The Annales historians rebelled against traditional historical practice by refusing to think of history as the study of facts, wars, states, and great men. For them, it was the structures of everyday life of a given period that should be investigated, in order to have a more comprehensive understanding of the ''mentality'' of the period. The key concept of ''mentality'' refers to the shared beliefs and behaviors that were so familiar that they were rendered invisible. For historians like Jacques le Goff, Philippe Aries, and Fernand Braudel, it was the attitudes and patterns of behavior of ordinary people, and not those of heroes, who could unlock the thoughts and ideas of a specific historical period. When we think of how European history and history as a discipline have benefited from the insights of the Annales School, its deployment by Williams in analyzing Japanese religious history is commendable.

In essence, The Other Side of Zen investigates one main question: how did Soto become the largest Buddhist sect in the Tokugawa period, with seventy-five thousand temples? Williams' argument is twofold. First, by attending to the ''otherworldly'' needs of parishioners through funeral and memorial rites on the one hand and ''this-worldly'' needs through prayers and rituals for rain, good harvest, protection against fire and drowning, and dispensing medicine, Soto was able to connect intimately with ordinary people's lives. Second, by incorporating indigenous pre- Buddhist beliefs and trans-sectarian rituals and deities, in addition to the specific rites of Soto Zen, the sect was able to maintain and expand its temples.

This book is based on Williams' Ph.D. thesis, and the sheer number of endnotes attests to this (of the book's 241 pages, sixty are devoted to notes). However, the text itself does not suffer from ''over-theorizing'' or excessive use of jargon. It is written in accessible language for both academic and non-academic audiences. Indeed, the use of vignettes that encapsulate the issues being discussed make for a fascinating read. For instance, we have stories of how Zen priests used magical powers to appease ghosts, erase evil karma, and deliver salvation by bestowing precepts and a Zen lineage chart (p. 43); letters containing sex scandals involving parishioners and priests (pp. 14-15); stories of miraculous cures by the ingesting of talismans (p. 103) and medicine purportedly handed down by Dogen (p. 89); and legends of Zen priests becoming Shinto deities (p. 74).

Nevertheless, I would have liked a more visual portrait of the temples and sites investigated. Although there are a few pictures of documents and talismans, pictures of the temples investigated (e.g., Daiyu zan, extensively analyzed in chapter 4) or a map with the location of the sites analyzed in the book would have helped give the reader a more concrete idea of the places discussed. But this, of course, does not in any way diminish the impressive scholarship Williams presents. Indeed, The Other Side of Zen offers a rich, ground-breaking contribution to the history of the Soto Zen sect and of Tokugawa Japan.

FOUR-DIMENSIONAL TIME IN DZOGCHEN AND HEIDEGGER

2007-10-05T19:45:00.000-07:00

FOUR-DIMENSIONAL TIME IN DZOGCHEN AND HEIDEGGER
Yao, Zhihua
10884 words
1 October 2007
Philosophy East & West
512
Volume 57; Issue 4; ISSN: 00318221
English
© 2007 Philosophy East & West. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Time is flying. The passage of time is usually viewed as a negative thing that brings us closer to death. To the conventional mind, it seems that we are moving ever forward, from a definite past into an uncertain future. The past is over; it is unchangeable, and in a certain sense it is "out there." The future, on the other hand, seems yet undetermined. It could turn out to be one thing or another. We often feel ourselves to be helpless spectators as the scope of the determined past edges its way into an uncertain future.

As time passes, we sadly realize that we are mortal and that there is a definite end to our lives. For this very reason, some may strive to maintain a longer life in this world, while others may imagine an eternal life in another world. Concerning time, we have many puzzles to contend with, such as what eternity is, how it is related to the passage of time, whether the passage of time is irreversible, whether things past are now no-longer, whether the future is unpredictable, whether or not the present exists, and so on.

The present article is an attempt to discuss such experiences of the passage of time. Among numerous individuals who have been pondering this mundane but nonetheless serious issue, I single out two: Longchenpa (1308-1363), who represents the Dzogchen tradition of Tantric Buddhism, and Heidegger (1889-1976), who represents the School of Phenomenology in the West. Instead of speculating on an eternal life, both of them attempt to look into the very phenomenon and experience of the passage of time and reveal to us a new dimension of time, the so-called fourth time or fourth dimension of time.

This article will proceed in four sections. In the first section, I will introduce a Buddhist practice in the Dzogchen tradition that deals with the experience of the passage of time. In the second section, Longchenpa's concept of four times (dusbzhi) will be analyzed and its significance for the history of Buddhism discussed. In the third section, I will examine Heidegger's concept of four-dimensional time and briefly discuss its elaboration by later philosophers. In conclusion, I will discuss the similarities and differences between the four-dimensional time theories as found in these two diverse traditions and the possible reasons for their striking similarities.

A Dzogchen Practice

Buddhist philosophy is not the product of purely intellectual speculation, but rather relies heavily on practice and experience. In the Buddhist view, any theory or concept has to be drawn from and applicable to meditative practice, what is not being considered empty speculation. In this interaction between knowledge and practice, one gains the wisdom to see into reality.

The following is an example of such a practical instruction in the Dzogchen tradition. In The Mirror: Advice on the Presence of Awareness, Namkhai Norbu, a contemporary Dzogchen master, gives the following advice to practitioners:

The recognition of our true State and the continuation of its presence really is the essence of all paths, the basis of all meditation, the conclusion of all practices, the path of all the secret methods, and the key to all the deeper teachings. This is why it is vitally important that we seek out our way to maintain continuous presence without being pulled off course.

This means: not hanging on to the past, not going after the future, and, without letting ourselves get involved in the illusory thoughts arising in the present moment, turning inwards and observing our own mind, leaving it in its true State beyond the limitations of past, present and future. Without letting ourselves be conditioned by contaminating conceptualization, without passing judgment on the State itself, whether indeed it even exists, whether it will turn out to be positive or negative, etc., we must stay focused in this authentic condition and not try to correct it.

Although the primordial State of total perfection is completely beyond the limits of past, present and future, one is not immediately aware of this and indeed has difficulty in recognizing it when first starting to practice, and therefore it is important to be on the alert against distraction by thoughts of the "three times."1

This is an instruction on how to maintain one's "true State." To keep one's mind in this true state, one must not be distracted by thoughts of the three times. To do this, one must not hang on to the past, go after the future, or get entangled in the present moment. This is the key to meditative practice. According to the instruction, the past is no-longer, and one should not follow it; the future has not yet arrived, and one should not anticipate it; the present is momentary, and one should not dwell on it. This practice is an antidote to our ordinary experience. In our everyday life, we either live in our memories of the past, anticipate the future, or hold on to the present moment. It seems that this is the only way that we can appreciate the value of time, and live a meaningful life during the passage of time. If there is no past, present, or future to hold on to, how can we live on?

The Dzogchen master answers: "Relax." Compared to many poets who burst into tears upon realizing the emptiness of the passage of time, the Dzogchen master is more skillful and firm in teaching how to deal with this difficult situation. It is actually the very goal of Buddhist practice to see through the passage of time and to realize the very nature of reality beyond the momentary and impermanent. Here "relax" not only means to take it easy; it is also the key to practice: let it be. Namkhai Norbu points out that "Dzogchen could be defined as a way to relax completely. This can be clearly understood from the terms used to denote the state of contemplation, such as 'leave it just as it is' (cog.bzhag), 'cutting loose one's tension' (khregs. chod), 'beyond effort' (rtsol.bral), and so on."2

With respect to the past, present, and future, one may find it easier to start with giving up anticipation of the future by making no effort to achieve spiritual attainment. Then one can cut off memory of the past by negating the self to be the agent of past deeds. This way one can experience the emptiness of "no-longer" and "not-yet." In this experience, there may still be some thoughts arising moment by moment, and eradicating them is the hardest part of the practice. Since the moment of thought is always in the present, in the sense that it is here and now, it is very difficult in practice not to dwell on the present, not to get involved in present thoughts, and to let them be. According to Namkhai Norbu's instruction, one should leave these thoughts just as they are without getting sidetracked, forgetting, or letting oneself get wrapped up in them.

It is in the non-dwelling of the past, present, and future that the true state of one's mind arises. This state, also called the primordial state of total perfection, is the state completely beyond the limits of the past, present, and future. And the goal of the meditative practice is to relax, that is, to be free from the distractions of thoughts of the "three times," and to maintain the presence of the authentic state. Relaxation and realization are thus two sides of a coin; as Namkhai Norbu says: "When the mind is naturally released and present, it comes to itself in its authentic State."3 Now the questions remains: why have a positive attitude toward the present? Why let the mind or its authentic state involve itself in the present-why not just let it go as illusory thought? How do you keep its presence without being reduced to grasping the present, that is, the "here and now"?

I feel that by "to remain present and relaxed" Namkhai Norbu means to maintain the presence of the natural, authentic state of perfection. "Present" here means to let it "be present," inferring a dynamic process of presenting. It is not a dwelling on the static here and now; rather it is a continuous effort and activity to maintain "presence." This is like a rowboat heading downstream. The rower cannot exert himself, but he has to maintain a certain direction so that the boat does not run aground, but moves with the flow of the water. At this point, a distinction between two senses of "present" by Masao Abe, a Zen scholar, is helpful. One is the relative present, considered to stand side by side or parallel with the past and future, and the other is the absolute present that embraces past, present, and future as their more fundamental basis.4

Therefore, we have to keep in mind that, to follow the teaching of the recognition of our true state and the continuation of its presence, "[t]he point is not to regard the movement as a negative thing, something to be rejected."5 In a traditional Buddhist context, however, it is rather difficult to appreciate a dynamic sense of presence and to treat it positively. This is because tranquillity is generally considered to be superior to movement, and one who achieves nirvana is said to eliminate all activities. In this sense, Dzogchen and, for that matter, Zen are unique in taking movement into account.

In meditative practice, when a momentary thought arises, an authentic state of calm is seen to arise side by side with it, so the key is not to be conditioned by thought, and yet not to pass judgment on it-that is, to consider whether or not its object exists, or whether it is positive or negative. One thought may disappear in a certain period of time, and another will then arise without interruption. This is what is called "movement." In the Dzogchen tradition it is necessary to learn to work with this movement. Movement and calmness or tranquillity are seen to be two aspects of one state, and the movement of thought to be the functioning of the state of clarity. When one is actually in meditation, in the state of pure presence, there is no difference between the calm state and movement. Thus, there is no need for one to seek a state that is without thought; rather one should just maintain one and the same state of presence in one's experience. As Garab Dorje says: "If there does arise [the movement of thoughts], be aware of the state in which they arise. If one is free of thoughts, be aware of the state in which one is free of them. Then there is no difference between the arising of thought and being free of it."6 Only by not-judging and lettingbe can one maintain the authentic state of perfection, which is both of movement and of tranquillity. As Namkhai Norbu points out: " 'To meditate' only means to keep presence both of the state of calm and of that of movement: there is nothing on which to meditate."7

Then how is this true state, which is beyond the past, present, and future, related to time? Is it totally different from time or only another dimension of time? Namkhai Norbu does not state this clearly. But in emphasizing its movement, he tends to take it to be part of time and yet be beyond the "three times" in the conventional sense. By tracing back to the early Dzogchen tradition, I found a better term for it: "timeless time" or the "fourth time."

The Four Times

Longchenpa, or Klong-chen rab-'byams-pa, was an eminent Dzogchen master and adept of the Nyingmapa School. He is one of Tibet's most celebrated writers, and in his relatively short life he produced an enormous number of works, amounting to two hundred and seventy titles. Throughout these works, he reveals himself as an independent and original thinker, though, in support of his own brilliant expositions, he quotes from the vast literature that had already developed during the early phase of Buddhism in Tibet. The notion of the "four times" (dus-bzhi) is one of the most interesting ideas I have found in his extensive output.

In his Naturally Liberated Mind, the Great Perfection (Mahasandhicittatasvamutki- nama, rDzogs-Pa Ch'en-Po Sems-Nyid Rang-Grol), while elaborating on the epithet of Sambhogakaya, which includes the pure Buddha-Land, the mandala, the Teachers of Five Classes, Primordial Wisdom, retinues of disciples, and so on, Longchenpa brings up the notion of the four times. He states the third and fifth epithets to be as follows:

(3) . . . the self-precept retinues of disciples of the ten directions and four times. (Translator's note reads "Dus-bZhi: past, present, future and timeless time.")

(5) The three times and timeless time is Kuntu Zangpo time, And it is the originally accomplished and changeless state.8

The phrase "ten directions and four times" (phyogs-bchu dus-bzhi) is found in some Tantric literature.9 The ten directions include east, south, west, north, northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest, zenith, and nadir. The four times, as indicated in the passage quoted above, are the past, present, future, and timeless time. Some commentators take this to mean four aeons, namely the Krta, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali Yugas.10 This, however, is in contrast to the standard notion of the "three times," which is established in the Abhidharma tradition and used throughout the subsequent history of Buddhist literature.11 The additional time may be the contribution of the general appreciation of quaternity in the Tantric tradition, which, again, may have its origin in an earlier source.

The fourth time is called no-time, timeless time, Kuntu Zangpo time, state of Kuntu Zangpo, or Samantabhadra time. Among these various names, Kuntu Zangpo or its Sanskrit equivalent, Samantabhadra, is a very loaded term in the Dzogchen tradition. It refers to the Buddha of the same name, and is considered to be the symbol of Dharmakaya,12 while in Bon teachings it refers to Sambhogakaya.13 According to Guenther, the expression Kuntu Zangpo "is synonymous with rig-pa, the cognition of being qua being, or a value-sustained cognition having a strongly aesthetic character." 14

To introduce the idea of the four times, Longchenpa starts with the experience of the three times. Like Namkhai Norbu, he expresses his experience of the past, present, and future in terms of "ceased," "not-lingering," and "not yet coming," respectively:

Past-it [i.e., mind] has ceased; future-it has not yet come into existence;

Present-it does not linger. It is neither within nor without nor anywhere.

Know it to be like the sky and immune to propositions about it.15

It is interesting to note that Longchenpa's understanding of the present to be notlingering is different from that of traditional Indian Buddhism. Vasubandhu, in his early Abhidharma and later Yogacara writings, gives a consistent definition of the three times:

[T]he time periods and the conditions are established through the operation of the activity [of] a dharma: when a dharma does not accomplish its operation, it is future; when it is accomplishing it, it is present; and when its operation has come to an end, it is past.16

Among these definitions, the future as "not accomplishing" and the past as "coming to an end" are similar to Longchenpa's notions of "not yet coming" and "ceased." But as for the present, Vasubandhu understands it to mean "be accomplishing," while Longchenpa holds it to be "not-lingering." By the same token, this view is different from Nagarjuna's understanding the present to be "what is arising here and now (pratyutpanna)."17 At this point, Longchenpa comes closer to the notion of three times held among Japanese Buddhists and mentioned by Dogen in the following passage:

[A common belief] says that the past life has already perished, the future is yet to come, and the present does not stay. The past did not necessarily already perish, the future is not inevitably yet to come, and the present is not inexorably impermanent. If you learn the not-staying, the not-yet, and the no-longer as present, future, and past, respectively, you should certainly understand the reason that the not-yet is the past, present, and future. [The same holds true of the no-longer and the not-staying.]18

Here Dogen is sophisticated enough to go further than what he calls the "common belief" of three times, which is held by Longchenpa. Examining this carefully, though, one will find that Dogen is not really against this common notion, but is rather trying to emphasize the interpenetration of the three times, which obviously bears the mark of the Huayan way of thinking. In a similar way, Longchenpa, by taking this notion of three times into account, seeks to bring out a further dimension of time.

In the quotation above from Longchenpa, the mind is seen to have ceased activity in the past, not yet come to existence in the future, and does not linger in the present, and thus it cannot be located in any of the three times. For this reason, it is empty like the sky, and one cannot have any conception of it. This is one aspect of mind's nature. On the other hand, Longchenpa says that it is wrong to search for the mind either in the past, the present, or the future, for it is always there, "naturally remaining identical with itself." This self-existence, like emptiness, is beyond any conception. Thus, one should not be "seeking mind by mind." Rather, one should relax, let oneself be, and thus let the mind be. This is beautifully put by Longchenpa:

It is not in the has-been, nor is it on the side of the not-yet;

It is not in a now, but is a state naturally remaining identical with itself;

Instead of seeking mind by mind, let be.19

After one regains his true mind by relaxing and letting words, thoughts, and talk pass by, then how is this mind related to time? Is it simply beyond time? Longchenpa says the mind can be seen as the "time" that remains when one transcends the three times. In other words, when past, present, and future are not time, the mind or pristine cognitiveness is itself time:

This self-existing pristine cognitiveness, (evoked through) the Guru's sustaining power,

Is seen when words and thoughts and talk have passed away.

To see it then as time

Is (the moment) when the three aspects of time are no-time, and a "before" or a "later" can no longer be distinguished.

It is called Prajnaparamita, Madhyamika,

Zhi-byed, calming (the rush of) propositions and suffering, Mahamudra,

rDzogs-chen, the very meaningfulness of meaningfulness.20

Here Longchenpa does not show us in detail how the three times are no-time. The key point for him seems to be the making of no distinction between before and after. Moreover, he attributes this view to various traditions in the history of Buddhism, such as Prajnaparamita, Madhyamika, Zhi-byed, Mahamudra, and rDzogs-chen. Among these teachings, Nagarjuna's argument that the three times are no-time can be singled out to be representative. The very point of this argument is that time cannot be conceived of as an entity existing independently of temporal phenomena, but must itself be regarded as a set of relations among them. That is, the only mode of existence that time has is as a set of relations among empirical phenomena, or as the provisional distinction of before and after. Apart from these relations and distinctions, there is no time.21

Since the existence of the three times is based on the provisional distinction of before and after, if there is no such distinction, then there is no time in the conventional sense. But the state of mind or cognitiveness is seen to be a "time" in the sense that there are no temporal distinctions or separations, which makes this time different from the three times that are based on provisional distinctions. Longchenpa says:

In the simultaneity of rising and being free, one is free from all emotions;

Having gone beyond subjective ideas, one engages in this very reach and range of calm and peace,

In the vortex of meaningfulness, when the three aspects of time do not exist as time-

As in a phantom, not introducing any break in time.22

One distinct feature of the Dzogchen teaching is that it still names the state of no-time as a time or real time. And the concept of timeless time is unique in the history of Buddhism. In the early Buddhist literature, there is the notion of the "timeless" (akalika) in reference to the unconditional state, but not that of "timeless time."23 The Abhidharma tradition makes a clear distinction and contrast between the three times and the timeless, or the conditional reality and unconditional space and nirvana. In this tradition, space is superior to time, and cessation (nirodha) is preferable to action. Time, being a mark of the profane world, can never be considered in terms of eternity. In his Abhidharmakosabhasya, Vasubandhu indicates such a distinction by saying "the conditioned dharmas of the three time periods are karanahetu; the unconditioned dharmas are outside of time."24

Nagarjuna, as I mentioned earlier, takes time to be a derived notion, and it is only valid in the conventional sense. At the ultimate level, there is neither past, present, nor future. To show that time only exists as a derived notion, Nagarjuna argues that "in the teachings of the Buddha mostly samaya is used and it is only rarely that ka la is used."25 The distinction between samaya and kala by Nagarjuna shows that Indian Buddhist scholars in general are arguing against the view held by other Indian philosophical schools, such as Jainism, Vaisesika, and Nyaya, which takes time to be an all-pervading, partless substance.26 And the term kala is heavily loaded with this substantialist sense, while Buddhism from its very beginning has attacked such a substantial way of thinking with its fundamental doctrines of no-self, impermanence, and nirvana. As a result, it has become a taboo in the Buddhist tradition to appreciate time in the sense of an all-pervasive dynamic reality. Instead, time is only treated as a mark of the impermanent, profane conditioned world.

The first attempt to attack such a taboo can be seen in the Milindapanha, a sutra of early Buddhism, where the distinction is made between the "time that exists" and the "time that does not."27 Here one gets a hint that time that does not exist could in a certain sense be referring to timeless time. But the text goes on to say that the root of time is ignorance, and that liberation results from an evolution from the time that exists to the time that does not. This way, time is again categorized according to the dualistic distinction of conditional and unconditional realities.

To break down the barrier between samsara and nirvana, the conditional and the unconditional world, is one of the major aims of the Mahayana school. However, so far as the issue of time is concerned, they still take no-time to be superior to time and do not really appreciate time in the sense of dynamic movement. This situation did not change until the Dzogchen tradition brought together time and the timeless, allowing the timeless to penetrate into time. Having its origin in Tathagatagarbha thought, the Dzogchen program is to keep dynamic movement in its scope. As Guenther points out: "What distinguishes rDzogs-chen thinking from all other modes of thought is that it is pure process thinking."28 The Buddha nature is considered to be all pervasive and creatively transforming the conditional world, which is categorized by the three times. The key here is to appreciate not only its all-pervasive nature but also its creative action of transformation. This inevitably leads to a reinterpretation and redefinition of terms that are otherwise commonly used in the predominantly static way in which ordinary language is structured.

The concept of timeless time opens up a new dimension in the Buddhist worldview. The reason that the Dzogchen tradition still calls the timeless a "time" is that it takes both time and the timeless to be of the same nature of dynamic transformation. The no-time or fourth time is as dynamic as the three times. This is not only experienced in one's mind but also can be extended to the whole realm of existence. As Guenther says: "This meaning-rich gestalt dynamics is always and everywhere present, pervading everything from the highest imaginable reality (Kun-tu bzang-po) down to the smallest louse."29 Actually the timeless time is itself called by Longchenpa Kuntu Zangpo or Samantabhadra, which equates to the highest reality:

The primordially empty Mind, which has no root,

Is not defiled by the phenomenal appearance of samsara and nirvana.

Throughout the three times and timeless time, the state of Kunzu Zangpo,

The essence of the changeless perfection at the basis is

Undefiled by the appearances of the six objects, like the water-moon [the moon's reflection in water].30

Furthermore, he says:

The time is not a determinate event, but the ground (Being-as-such) being complete and not altering (position) or changing.

Samantabhadra time, in which the three aspects of time are timeless,

The overruling prereflectively experienced meaning in which everything is complete and alike,

Is a reach and range pure in itself from the very beginning.31

To describe the highest reality, Longchenpa adopts terms such as "the primordially empty Mind," "no-root," "not defiled by samsara and nirvana," "changeless," "perfection," "the basis," "the ground," "complete," "not altering," "not changing," "pure," "in itself," and so on. In Tibetan a single term gzhi (*asraya) is used to denote this reality. Literally meaning "ground" or "basis," gzhi is usually translated as "reason," "the whole," or "Being." According to the Dzogchen teaching, this reality is purely dynamic, and its creative, dynamic nature ensures that it is never "at rest." "This 'never-being-at-rest' expresses itself in a complementarity that . . . is imaged as Kun-tu bzang-po (the male aspect) and Kun-tu bzang-mo (the female aspect)."32

In the Dzogchen tradition, Kuntu Zangpo and Kuntu Zangmo are usually represented as an image of a naked man and woman in intimate embrace. However, one should not stick to its anthropomorphic associations. The male Kuntu Zangpo symbolizes the principle of the lighting-up or coming-to-presence (snang-cha) of gzhi, and the female Kuntu Zangmo the principle of openness or nothingness (stongcha). Their nakedness signifies that they are the purest of the pure, and no ornaments or drapery can interfere with their pure dynamics. And their intimate embrace symbolizes the complementarity or inseparability of these two principles.33

Kuntu Zangpo, being the fourth dimension of time, does not stand outside gzhi or the highest reality, but is within the unfolding and presenting of the reality. In this process of unfolding, the space-like principle of openness or nothingness can make room for the dynamics of the highest reality to be possible. On the other hand, the principle of lighting-up or coming-to-presence as dynamic "activity" (thabs) shows the very nature of nothingness or openness. This dynamic process, called "creativity" (rtsal), "play" (rol-pa), or "ornament" (rgyan), reflects the inner dynamics and spontaneity or spontaneous givenness (lhun-grub) of gzhi.34

This is called the self-organizing principle of the highest reality. And it is rather crucial whether one recognizes such a self-manifestation process as gzhi itself. If one does, one will be enlightened into the highest reality; "If, however, one does not recognize this auto-presencing of Being [gzhi] as an auto-presencing, this (failure) becomes the reason for going astray into the status of a mentation-governed (sentient) being (sems-can) within the three world spheres."35 That is, one will fall into the circle of samsara.

To summarize, time in the Dzogchen understanding not only consists of three times of no-longer, not-yet, and no-dwelling, but also of a fourth Kuntu Zangpo time characterized by its coming-to-presence, which reveals the very nature of the highest reality, gzhi, which is self-presentation.

Four-dimensional Time

Among Western philosophers, Heidegger is one of the few who treats time seriously and brings it within the scope of metaphysics, thus breaking through the "'gap' between 'temporal' being and 'supratemporal' eternal being,"36 which has remained a fundamental distinction throughout the history of Western philosophy. By taking time to be the only secret path to being, he has totally changed the outlook of traditional Western metaphysics in the sense that he brings change and dynamics into the dominant substantialist way of thinking.

Heidegger starts his metaphysical questioning of being with human existence, which he indicates by the use of the technical term Dasein. This usage has a direct source in the approach of the phenomenological movement, which focuses on one's immanent experience and thus avoids traditional dogmatism. Though Heidegger is critiqued for his anthropological turning in the circle of phenomenology, he still operates along the lines of phenomenology with the exception that he expands a Husserlian static perception to a living experience of human existence. In this sense, he comes closer to Buddhism, whose entire strategy is to experience, analyze, and transcend human existence.

As for the issue of time, Heidegger does not attempt to provide a metaphysical definition of time to begin with, but rather starts with temporality (Zeitlichkeit) as the experience of human existence. In the experience of time, he challenges the conventional notions of the three times, and warns about keeping a distance from "all of the meanings of 'future,' 'past,' and 'present' initially urging themselves upon us from the vulgar concept of time."37 In his view, the vulgar concept of time arises from an inauthentic temporality or an inauthentic understanding of time, which is in contrast to the authentic temporality that he is exploring.

Continuing with his exploration of authentic temporality, Heidegger makes use of some new terminology. When he refers to "past" (Vergangenheit), he uses the term "having-been" (Gewesenheit). "Past," literally what has passed away, is a "no-longer" as understood by Longchenpa and by Buddhism in general. To Heidegger, this is a vulgarity and hence an inauthentic understanding of the past. To differentiate himself from this understanding, he uses the word "having-been" to indicate the sense of the "already-being-in" of the past. For him, what is past is not "nolonger- now but earlier," but, on the contrary, what he thinks of as "it is never past, but is always already having-been in the sense of 'I-am-as-having-been."'38 This having-been brings one "back to" what has been happening, thus making it "a constituent of the ecstatic unity of the temporality of Da-sein."39 It is through this crucial distinction between "passing away" and "coming back" that Heidegger contrasts the ordinary usage of "the past" from what he calls "the having-been." By the same token, Heidegger distinguishes the authentic and inauthentic understanding of having-been by the terms retrieve (Wiederholen) and forgottenness (Vergessen), respectively.

For the future, Heidegger does not pick up a new term. But the German word that he uses, Zukunft, is very different from the English "future," which, like the German word Futur, denotes a chronological sense of "later time" and indicates a rather linear understanding of time. Zukunft, on the other hand, in German can mean zukommen, or to come, and ankunft, or to arrive, and an equivalence may be found in the Old English word "advent." Therefore, the future is not denoted in a chronological sense of "not-yet-now," but instead as "being-ahead-of-oneself."40 In anticipation of going ahead of oneself, one makes the future come toward itself. Thus, anticipation is seen to be the authentic mode of the future. On the other hand, awaiting, or passively longing for a future point of time, is considered to be inauthentic. Here it is interesting to notice that the anticipation of the future is seen to be an attachment in Buddhism, which would consider an authentic mode to be nonanticipation of the future.

Among the English words for the three times, the "present" best matches its German equivalence in Heidegger's usage. The German word Gegenwart literally means to be present in a certain place or event. It refers not only to physically bringing forth something, but also to calling up something in one's mind. Thus, the present is to "be present," that is, "letting something be encountered."41 This understanding denotes the present in an active sense in that one is always encountering or being-together-with something. Heidegger also distinguishes the authentic and inauthentic presents to be the moment (Augenblick) and making present (Gegenwαrtigen), respectively. His understanding is that the moment being an authentic present "lets us encounter for the first time what can be 'in a time' as something at hand or objectively present,"42 while making present marks a general quality of the present, for "every present makes present, but not every present is 'in the moment."'43

While treating "making present" to be the inauthentic present, Heidegger does not distinguish the present (Gegenwart) from "presence" (Anwesenheit), and he uses the two terms interchangeably. This makes the phenomenon of the present more complicated. He says: "Presencing, presence speaks of the present [Aus Anwesen, Anwesenheit spricht Gegenwart]. According to current representations, the present, together with past and future, forms the character of time. Being is determined as presence by time."44 This became a topic for Derrida, and he observes that in Being and Time and in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics it is difficult to distinguish rigorously between presence as Anwesenheit and presence as Gegenwαrtigkeit, and in other works Gegenwαrtigkeit becomes more and more a restriction of Anwesenheit.45

Though not distinguishing the present and presencing or presence, Heidegger sharply contrasts the present to nowness (Jetzt), which is taken to be the key character in the vulgar concept of time. He thinks that "the present in the sense of presence differs so vastly from the present in the sense of the now that the present as presence can in no way be determined in terms of the present as the now. The reverse would rather seem possible."46 The relationship between these three concepts can be summarized as follows: "Time is presencing as present: 'present' (Gegenwart) is nothing but presence (Anwesenheit), which cannot be determined in terms of the present as the now."47 Heidegger thinks that the history of Western philosophy is dominated by this vulgar understanding of time:

For as soon as reflection on the essence of time began, at the end of Greek philosophy with Aristotle, time itself had to be taken as something somehow present, ousia tis. Consequently time was considered from the standpoint of "now," the actual moment. The past is the "no-longer-now," the future is the "not-yet-now."48

In this vulgar understanding, time is a succession of nows uninterrupted and without gaps. No matter how far one divides the now, it is still always now. In this uninterrupted succession of nows, every now is already either a just now or a rightaway. Heidegger points out:

If the characterization of time keeps primarily and exclusively to this succession, no beginning and no end can be found in principle in it as such. Every last now, as a now, is always already a right-away that is no-longer, thus it is time in the sense of the no-longer- now, of the past. Every first now is always a just-now-not-yet, thus it is time in the sense of the not-yet-now, the "future." Time is thus endless "in both directions."49

As a result, one has the one-dimensional linear time as experienced in ordinary life. This vulgar understanding can be characterized by its dwelling on nowness, which in the Buddhist view is again an attachment to be gotten rid of. Jean-Luc Marion confirms Heidegger's observation by pointing out that "This ontological overdetermination of a primacy of the present leads to a double reduction of the future and of the past: the past finishes and the future begins as soon as the present begins or finishes. Their respective temporalities count only negatively, as a double nonpresent, even a double nontime."50 Here "the present" is used in the sense of "here and now." The nowness cancels out past and future, thus leaving one attached to the static here and now.

To detach himself from the nowness or "objective present" (Vorhandenheit), Heidegger is in favor of a futural orientation: "the future has priority in the ecstatic unity of primordial and authentic temporality. . . . Primordial and authentic temporality temporalizes itself out of the authentic future, and indeed in such a way that, futurally having-been, it first arouses the present. The primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future."51 This way, he takes possibility to be superior to actuality. In his view, human existence is always ahead of oneself and thus keeps an open horizon of being in the future. This possibility of moving toward the future also makes time itself dynamic and breaks the chain of nowness. Here it is interesting to notice that for the same purpose of transcending static time, Derrida is in favor of the past. His key concept differance is "a 'past' that has never been present, and which never will be, whose future to come will never be a production or a reproduction in the form of presence."52

Though the future has priority over the past and the present, in Heidegger's view the three times interpenetrate each other. The present arises in the unity of the future and the having-been, and thus the horizon of a present temporalizes itself equiprimordially with those of the future and the having-been. The same is true with the past and the future. As Heidegger puts it: "Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having-been temporality."53 This temporality (Zeitlichkeit) is a unity of motions of "toward," "back to," and "together with" that reveals itself to be an ecstatic moving out of itself. This picture of the interpenetration of the three times is very similar to the view of time in Dogen and Huayan philosophy.

Though he discusses temporality in great detail, in Being and Time Heidegger does not get into time itself, which is supposed to be the topic of the unfinished part of the book. In a 1962 lecture titled On Time and Being, Heidegger reveals a part of his thinking on time. In this lecture, the leading question remains the same as in Being and Time, and he continues his notions of the interpenetration or unity of the three times, in which each of them is presencing and revealing the others. This leads to the discussions of the dimension or dimensionality of time, ending up with the notion of four-dimensional time.

Time or temporality as explained above consists in the mutual reaching out and opening up of future, past, and present. Having-been offers the future to itself, and the reciprocal relation of both at the same time brings about the present. It is in this sense of opening up that one talks about the dimension or dimensionality of time. "Dimensionality consists in a reaching out that opens up, in which futural approaching brings about what has been, what has been brings about futural approaching, and the reciprocal relation of both brings about the opening up of openness."54 This threefold interplay of reaching out already reveals three dimensions of time.

However, there is something more if one examines time carefully, and it is the presencing (Anwesen) that has been discussed above. As we know, in Heidegger's Being and Time, presencing is nearly identical with the present. But in his On Time and Being, he holds that though presencing is given in the present, "[n]ot every presencing is necessarily the present."55 For presencing also manifests itself in absence, that is, what has been or what is to come, and this manner of presencing by no means coincides with presencing in the sense of the immediate present. Thus, in a way, presencing is the unity of the three interplaying ways of presencing and is the very dimension that makes these three dimensions and their interplay possible. Heidegger says:

In the approaching of what is not yet present and in the having-been of what is no longer present and even in the present itself, there always plays a kind of approach and bringing about, that is, a kind of presencing. We cannot attribute the presencing to be thus thought to one of the three dimensions of time, to the present which would seem obvious. Rather, the unity of time's three dimensions consists in the interplay of each toward each. This interplay proves to be the true extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension, so to speak-not only so to speak, but in the nature of the matter. True time is four-dimensional [vierdimensional].56

This is a most interesting statement, but, unfortunately, not many Heideggerian scholars have paid attention to it. Instead, many of us may be familiar with the concept of the fourfold world (Geviert Welt) found in the later works of Heidegger. This is a rather mystical view of the world, wherein the world consists of four elements, namely gods, heaven, earth, and mortals, and their interplay brings the whole world into a meaningful process of revealing. This worldview is called a playful mirror (Spiel-Spiegel), in the sense that each of the four reaches out in its own way while at the same time reflecting others in itself.

It is in the same manner that four dimensions of time interplay and reflect each other in a mirror-like realm. Using the metaphor of the playful mirror, if we say that object, image, and mirror are three dimensions, then the light that makes seeing a mirror image possible is the fourth dimension. It is the light that lights up the process of seeing and brings object, image, and mirror into play. In the interplay of the four, they reflect and reveal one another; thus, one sees an image in the mirror. In this metaphor, the light is not something beyond; rather it is the revealing or presencing of the thing itself. Thus, Heidegger thinks that what we called the fourth dimension of time should actually be the first, for it is the most original and determines the rest. This presencing makes the other three dimensions possible by the way it "brings about to each its own presencing, holds them apart thus opened and so holds them toward one another in the nearness by which the three dimensions remain near one another."57

In this sense the fourth dimension of time is the nearness (Nαhe) of presencing out of present, past, and future, the nearness that unifies time's threefold opening up. Meanwhile, the presencing that brings the three times near has the character of denial and withholding, for it brings future, past, and present near to one another by distancing them or holding them apart. "In true time and its time-space, the giving of what has-been, that is, of what is no longer present, the denial of the present manifested itself. In the giving of future, that is, of what is not yet present, the withholding of the present manifested itself. Denial and withholding exhibit the same trait as selfwithholding in sending: namely, self-withdrawal."58 This way it keeps open what has been by denying its advent as present, and keeps open the approach from the future by withholding the present from the approach. This is the manner by which what has been, what is about to be, and the present reach out toward each other.

Derrida is one of the very few who offer a follow-up to Heidegger's discussions at this point, and he interprets the unity of three times to be the play itself. He says: "The play (Zuspiel) also marks, works on, manifests the unity of the three dimensions of time, which is to say a fourth dimension: The 'giving' of the es gibt Zeit belongs to the play of this 'quadridimensionality,' to this properness of time that would thus be quadridimensional."59 Here Derrida draws upon Heidegger's notion of "es gibt Zeit" and thinks that the es gibt plays (spielt) in the movement of the disclosing (Entbergen), in that which frees from the withdrawal (retrait), when what is hidden shows itself or what is sheltered appears. He understands the giving to be the play; meanwhile the play is a play of gift. Thus, the fourth dimension of time is not a figure, or a manner of speaking or of counting; rather it is the giving of the thing itself. "This thing itself of time implies the play of the four and the play of the gift."60

For Derrida, this gift language is not a superficial correlation in language; rather it is deep-rooted in thought itself. He says: "That a gift is called a present, that 'to give' may also be said 'to make a present,' 'to give a present' (in French as well as in English, for example), this will not be for us just a verbal clue, a linguistic chance or alea."61 The present in the sense of gift is certainly not the present as the now being distinct from the no-longer-now of the past and the not-yet-now of the future. Rather this present speaks of presence, the fourth dimension of time. Derrida brings the ordinary experience of giving a gift to its relationship with time in a sophisticated way:

To give a gift requires that one then forget, and asks the other to forget, absolutely, that a gift has been given, so that the gift, if there is one, would vanish without a trace. If time is a calendar, a ring or annum, a circle or a cycle, then the gift calls upon us to tear up the circle of time, to breach the circular movement of exchange and reciprocity, and in a "moment" of madness, to do something for once without or beyond reason, in a time without time, to give without return.62

To give a gift is not for the purpose of exchange or reciprocity; it means giving without return. Thus, the giver and receiver both need to forget and leave no trace of the gift in their minds. This is contrary to the ordinary conception of gift, which is for the purpose of memorizing. With the vanishing of memory or trace, one goes beyond the conventional reason of exchange, and breaks the circle of time. A moment of "time without time" emerges in such an experience of a giving that leaves behind the cycle of time. Thus the present in the sense of gift is a time without time. Here it is important to notice that the phrase "time without time" comes very close to Longchenpa's notion of timeless time.

Marion, on the other hand, develops the idea of the present-being-gift in a theological context. He talks about the Eucharistic presence of Christ in consecrated bread and wine:

Not first of a privileged temporalization of time (the here and now of the present) but of the present, that is to say, of the gift. Eucharistic presence must be understood starting most certainly from the present, but the present must be understood first as a gift that is given. One must measure the dimensions of eucharistic presence against the fullness of this gift. . . . The rigor of the gift must order the dimensions of the temporality where the present is made gift.63

In Heidegger's own terms, the fourth time in the sense of presence or presencing shows itself to be letting-presence (Anwesenlassen). And letting shows its character in bringing into unconcealment. To allow presence means to unconceal, to bring to openness. This Heideggerian term of letting or Gelassenheit comes close to Longchenpa's terminology of rig-pa cog-gzhag-the letting-be that is gzhi's ecstatic intensity. 64 In unconcealing, a giving prevails, the giving that gives presencing in letting-presence. The sense of giving is enhanced by the expressions "Es gibt Zeit" or "Es gibt Sein." Heidegger thinks that one cannot say "time is" or "being is"; rather one should say "Es gibt Zeit" or "Es gibt Sein." Different from the English expression "there be," "es gibt" has the literal meaning of "it gives," from which Heidegger develops the gift-language.

Heidegger further distinguishes two modes of giving: sending (Schicken) and extending (Reichen). In "Es gibt Sein," the giving shows itself to be sending. Sending is the giving of being. The giving of being holds itself back and withdraws. Such a giving is called sending. Extending, on the other hand, is the giving of time: "We call the giving which gives true time an extending which opens and conceals. As extending is itself a giving, the giving of a giving is concealed in true time."65 In this extending there also belongs a keeping back, a denial or withdrawal. For the denial of the present and the withholding of the present play within the giving of what has been and what will be. In a denial extending, the giving in "Es gibt Zeit" opens up the four-dimensional realm. In this way, four-dimensional true time has reached us.

As Heidegger understands it, extending is superior to sending, for "[s]ending of Being lies in the extending of time, [the] opening and concealing of manifold presence into the open realm of time-space."66 Thus, one may think that the fourfold extending of time could be the "It" (es) that gives the being in "Es gibt Sein." But Heidegger thinks time by no means is the "It" that gives being, "[f]or time itself remains the gift of an 'It gives' whose giving preserves the realm in which presence is extended."67 Time as well as being remains to be the gift of an "It," which can be determined only in Ereignis.

Ereignis is the key concept in Heidegger's thought after 1936. He devotes himself to this single concept in many of his later works, some of which have been published only recently. In his notion of Ereignis, he is playing with the expression "es gibt." To a certain extent, he is obsessed by this single phrase in his later thought. He thinks that it is a common feature of Indo-Germanic languages, though in some, such as Greek and Latin, the "It" is lacking as a separate word or phonetic form, but what is meant by the "It" is still represented. He says: "The area of meaning meant by the It extends from [the] irrelevant to the demonic."68 In a certain sense, the "es gibt" stands for Ereignis. Thus, it means more than its common rendering of "occurrence," "happening," or "event"; the translations "the event of Appropriation," "Appropriation," or more recently "enowning" reflect more accurately the sense Heidegger is trying to convey.

Time gives being, and itself is given by Ereignis. Both time and being are the gift of Ereignis. "Accordingly, the It that gives in 'It gives Being,' 'It gives time,' proves to be Appropriation [Ereignis]."69 Ereignis determines the destiny of being and extends time as the region (Gegend). This way it determines time and being into their own, that is, in their belonging together. Heidegger says: "What determines both, time and Being, in their own, that is, in their belonging together, we shall call: Ereignis, the event of Appropriation."70

In their belonging together, time and being are appropriated in Ereignis. Heidegger thinks that one cannot say "Ereignis is" or "there is (es gibt) Ereignis"; rather one should say "Ereignis appropriates (ereignet)." To appropriate itself, Ereignis must withdraw, that is, expropriate (enteignet). Ereignis withdraws from the boundless unconcealment of what is most fully its own. Withdrawal or expropriation (Enteignis) belongs to Ereignis. "By this expropriation, Appropriation does not abandon itself- rather, it preserves what is its own."71 The denial or withholding in Ereignis has already shown itself in the manner of sending and extending in which "It" gives being and time.

Heidegger thinks that "[t]he discussion of Appropriation is indeed the site of the farewell from Being and time, but Being and time remain, so to speak, as the gift of Appropriation."72 This is because Ereignis gives being and time while it withdraws; thus, being or time cannot totally identify themselves with Ereignis, but remain a gift of Ereignis. In its withdrawal, Ereignis sustains an absolute otherness, which is an otherness of total presencing, enclosing the otherness of the three times. This is different from the sense of otherness developed in Derrida or Levinas, which is primarily oriented either to the past or to the future. Derrida's differance is an absolute alterity in the sense that it is a "past" that has never been present and never will be. It keeps itself to be a trace or enigma. In Levinas, however, the other (autrui) is a relationship with the future, for the presence of the future in the present seems all the same accomplished face-to-face with the other. Levinas says: "I do not define the other by the future but the future by the other, for the very future of death consists in its total alterity."73 Otherness in this sense is like the strangeness of death, which always lies in the future.

To summarize, time according to Heidegger is an interpenetration of havingbeen, future, and present in which a fourth dimension of presencing manifests itself, and time itself is the gift of Ereignis, which remains as otherness in its withdrawal.

Tentative Conclusion

As we have seen, Longchenpa and the Dzogchen tradition in general understand the past to be no-longer, the future not-yet, and the present no-dwelling. In emphasizing the character of "no," Longchenpa shows the Buddhist inclination toward the insight of emptiness. To Longchenpa a Heideggerian understanding of present as to be "encountering with" is still a dwelling, and only in a no-dwelling and freely lettinggo mind can the ultimate reality manifest itself. Heidegger distances himself from the vulgar sense of time as a series of nownesses that turns out to be the very basis of substantial thinking. But he does not venture into emptiness, instead bringing out a picture of the interpenetration or interplay of the three times.

Both Longchenpa and Heidegger go beyond the conventional understanding of time by examining carefully the experience of the passage of time. In such an experience, a fourth time or dimension of time manifests itself to be presence or presencing. Such a presencing, for Longchenpa, is the coming-to-presence of the highest reality gzhi; for Heidegger, it is the gift of Ereignis, which itself withdraws and remains an otherness. By tracing time back to Ereignis or gzhi, both of them have investigated time in great depth. Being loaded concepts in their respective traditions, both Ereignis and gzhi bring up a dynamic process which breaks down the static barrier between time and the timeless as it is manifested in similar forms in the Western and Buddhist traditions.

The coincidence between the two thinkers is of great interest and importance. Is this because I interpret the Dzogchen tradition in a Heideggerian way, or because Heidegger's thought is too Buddhistic? Unless one finds actual evidence, it remains improbable that Heidegger had read or known anything about this fourteenthcentury Dzogchen master Longchenpa. Meanwhile, I have avoided using Heideggerian terms to interpret Longchenpa as Guenther so intentionally does. Nonetheless, the similarities between their concepts of four-dimensional time are still striking.

If I am allowed to speculate on the reason for this coincidence, I would say that one possibility is that they shared a certain common source in developing their views. For instance, in the Dzogchen tradition, fourfoldness occurs not only in its understanding of time but also in the concept of the four dynamic levels, and Dzogchen thought is considered to have its origin in a contact with Greek gnosticism.74 On the other hand, Heidegger in many ways develops his philosophy by tracing back to the Greek tradition, and his concept of the fourfold world is very much indebted to the ancient Greek worldview. Although Guenther warns us not to confuse the Dzogchen notion of fourfoldness with Heidegger's das Geviert,75 their obvious similarity in terms of fourfold time may still be attributed to their common source in the Greek tradition-a topic that certainly holds much promise for further research.

Another possibility, however, is that the quaternity might be embedded in the human mind, constituting a universal way of thinking. As is pointed out by C. G. Jung: "The quaternity is an archetype of almost universal occurrence," and "[t]he ideal of completeness is the circle or sphere, but its natural minimal division is a quaternity."76 Jung's observation is confirmed by the Tantric tradition, including Dzogchen, where the mandala, a circle embracing quaternity, is popularly used in meditative and ritual practice. One can infer from this theory that by delving sufficiently deeply into our own minds, we will reach the common ground of quaternity, at which point it is not only time that will be seen as fourfold, but also the whole of reality.

The comparative approach has long been accused of being an exercise in magic. Now, however, our comparison of four-dimensional time in Dzogchen and Heidegger does seem to have something to do with magic, insofar as it involves the fundamental mystery of the human mind. That fourfold time is inherently a part of the mysterious processes of the human mind is a source of profound wonder-but equally intriguing are the astonishing coincidences in the thought of Longchenpa and Heidegger as they independently developed this idea.

Timothy Fitzgerald - The Ideology of Religious Studies

2007-09-21T21:45:00.000-07:00

The Ideology of Religious Studies.(Review) (book review)
JIM STONE
2075 words
1 June 2001
Religious Studies
242
ISSN: 0034-4125; Volume 37; Issue 2
English
Copyright 2001 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved. COPYRIGHT 2001 Cambridge University Press

Timothy Fitzgerald The Ideology of Religious Studies. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Pp. xi + 276. $45.00. 0 19 512072 8.

Consider this position, which I will call the standard view' (SV). There is a widespread human concern with a reality taken to surpass the ordinary world revealed by sense perception. It is thought to consist either of sentient supernatural beings (e.g. gods, Adonai, or Brahman) or of an insentient metaphysical principle underlying the universe (e.g. The Unconditioned, Sunyata, or the Tao). Either way, the supermundane reality is positioned to figure centrally in the satisfaction of substantial human needs. It is controversial whether 'religion' can be defined; however, systems of practices rationalized by beliefs according to which the practices place us in a relation-of-value to such a reality are paradigmatic religions. Religions have social and political dimensions, but they should also be studied qua religions, as practices, institutions, beliefs, scriptures that flow from this sort of concern.

Timothy Fitzgerald's provocative book, The Ideology of Religious Studies, is dedicated to uprooting SV root and branch. He writes: 'Religion cannot reasonably be taken to be a valid analytical category since it does not pick out any distinctive cross-cultural aspect of human life' (4).'Religious' phenomena have profoundly different meanings within different cultures; when the phenomena are understood in the context of their local symbol systems and ritual institutions, the 'religious' dissolves into the anthropological, the political, and the sociological. The academic discipline of religious studies obstructs a clear view of what happens in other cultures. Fitzgerald proposes that it 'be rethought and re-represented as cultural studies, understood as the study of the institutions and the institutionalized values of specific societies, and the relation between those institutionalized values and the legitimation of power' (10).

Fundamental criticisms of an academic discipline should be taken seriously. Fitzgerald writes with intelligence and vigour, but with considerable detail. Much of his book's force lies in the details. I can deal only with the arguments that strike me as most central, and then only in broad strokes. The reader is forewarned that I'm constantly missing the trees for the forest. The first part of the book argues that religious studies is an ideology. In Chapter 1 Fitzgerald writes: 'The construction of "religion" and "religions" as global, cross-cultural objects of study has been part of a wider historical process of western imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism' (8). Contrasts between 'religion', on the one hand, and the 'secular', 'society', 'politics', on the other, are ideological constructions that were imposed on colonial cultures as part of establishing Western hegemony.

An immediate problem (which Fitzgerald acknowledges) is that every concept applied in cross-cultural studies (e.g. 'values', 'institutions') may have played an ideological role. More important, that concepts are constructed for imperialist purposes doesn't prove that they don't carve reality at the joints. In general, the fact that concepts and theories are the product of enterprises having little concern for truth should alert us to the possibility that they are mistaken, but it hardly warrants concluding they are false. The theory of evolution would have been true if it had originated as Nazi propaganda. To fail to see this is to commit the genetic fallacy. It's unclear to me how much work Fitzgerald thinks this 'deconstruction' talk does in supporting his book's thesis.

Another difficulty: Fitzgerald underestimates SV's cross-cultural adaptability -- as though 'religion' is wedded essentially to all these 'Western' contrasts. When I lived in India I soon recognized that the distinction between 'religion' and 'the secular' doesn't apply -- religiosity runs like electricity through virtually all things Indian -- but I had no trouble applying my old concept of religion. The cross-cultural inapplicability of the contrasts doesn't prove the inapplicability of 'religion'.

In chapter 2 Fitzgerald argues that religious studies, from its beginning in the nineteenth century, has been 'imbued with theological principles of the liberal ecumenical kind' (33), and is 'heavily loaded with Western Christian assumptions about God and salvation', thinly disguised as the scientific study of religion (34). The emphasis has been on interfaith dialogue and 'fitting the non-Christian institutions ... into the framework of liberal ecumenical theology, and into a classification system dominated by Judaeo-Christian concepts of worship, sacrifice, and so on' (54).

Once again Fitzgerald appears to be flirting with the genetic fallacy. That SV is theologically motivated is no reason to deny its truth. Indeed, if there is such a thing as religion, and Christianity is an instance, proceeding in covertly Christian terms may reveal much of importance about other religions. Assuming otherwise begs the question against SV.

In chapter 3, devoted to the work of Ninian Smart, Fitzgerald concludes that 'the language of "religion" and its "social dimension"' obscures 'the real object of study', which is not 'religion' but the way that power is legitimated in a particular context - a job for sociology (71). Suppose the category of 'a world religion' is valid for Christianity. This means that several distinct social groups claim to believe in 'something called Christianity'. Fitzgerald continues: 'But Christianity is here a theological concept, and its interpretation will depend on how it is understood by each different group. To grasp this ideological entity... we have to approach it through the sociological structure of the relevant group' (70).

But why call Christianity - on the face of things a pretty definite body of practices and beliefs (about Jesus, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection) - a 'theological concept' that requires 'interpretation', not to mention an 'ideological entity' in need of being 'grasped' through 'sociological structures'? Fitzgerald's argument's are often ill served by the jargon of cultural studies; it is hard to resist the view that he sees religion himself through an ideological lens.

Philosophers lately tend to agree that there is merely a 'family resemblance' between religions (to use Wittgenstein's term), a network of features generally shared, no single one of which belongs to every religion. In chapter 4, which deals largely with the work of Peter Byrne, Fitzgerald maintains that a 'family resemblance theory of religion overextends the notion so badly that it becomes impossible to determine what can and what cannot be included' (72). Without some essential characteristic, 'the family of religion becomes so large as to be practically meaningless and analytically useless' (73). I am sympathetic to this objection. The 'family resemblance' theory invites the charge that philosophy, ideology, politics, anything people really care about, is religion; but then 'religious studies' is defined too broadly to constitute an academic discipline.

I disagree, however, with Fitzgerald's additional claim that the failure of the 'family resemblance' theory of religion suggests that religion has 'no distinctive theoretical property and therefore cannot supply the basis of an academic discipline' (95). Religious studies is hardly the first discipline to need rescuing from Wittgenstein. I've argued in this journal that a religion is a system of practices meant to place us in a relation-of-value to a supermundane reality (that is, a reality surpassing the world revealed by sense perception) so grand that it can figure centrally in the satisfaction of substantial human needs. Fitzgerald's principal objection to such definitions appears to be that they are 'imbued with theological principles of a liberal ecumenical kind', which is hardly fatal. In any case, one of the book's strengths is that it shows that much depends on the success of such essentialist efforts.

Part 2 of the book concerns religion in India. Chapter 6 is about Ambedkar Buddhism. In the last century millions of untouchables in Maharashtra (led by B. R. Ambedkar, one of the framers of the Indian constitution) tried to change their status by convening to Buddhism. This led to a remarkable form of Buddhism in which Ambedkar, who died in 1956, is revered as much as the Buddha. Buddhist soteriology plays virtually no role in Ambedkar's version of Buddhism. 'According to Ambedkar's understanding, Buddha dhamma is essentially morality. By morality he means compassion, caring for one's fellow human and for the natural world.... On this line of reasoning, Buddhism becomes the basis of the new egalitarian society' (127). Fitzgerald finds the concept of religion 'unhelpful' in studying this movement (121). 'The concept of religion either as a traditional soteriology or as interaction with superhuman beings is patently inadequate for dealing with the realities of the situation of untouchable Buddhists'(129). An obvious response to Fitzgerald is that the concept of religion is unhelpful, not because it is defective or meaningless, but because Ambedkar Buddhism is principally a political movement in Buddhist trappings.

Hinduism is not a religion as much as a religious civilization. One cannot 'convert' to Hinduism, for instance; it is necessary to have a caste. In chapter 7 Fitzgerald argues plausibly that the wish to depict Hinduism as 'a world religion' has often led writers to ignore the profound influence on Hinduism of caste and concerns about ritual pollution. In addition, he suggests that categories such as 'ritual', 'hierarchy', 'gender', 'caste', 'ritual specialist', 'purity', and 'pollution' may provide a more precise framework than 'religion' to study Hinduism (144). Most fruitful to that study is understanding the 'fundamental symbolic system underlying the whole range of ritual institutions' (145). This system is rooted in dharma, Fitzgerald suggests.

Dharma is an eternal ritual order that defines the correct condition of all beings, whether they be gods, demons, animals, ancestors, members of different castes and sub castes. Dharma is fundamentally an ideological expression of hierarchy or ritual order that embraces the whole mythical cosmos but is manifested to the observer most evidently in caste, including the power exercised by the king or the dominant castes in contemporary India (145). I take the force of this to be that to understand Hinduism, finally, we must understand the relevant institutionalized values and their relation to the legitimation of power; but then talk of 'religion' is irrelevant.

This perspective is illuminating, but perhaps Fitzgerald is carried away by his vision. If the more 'precise' categories plus dharma explain Hinduism, what is the supernatural realm doing there at all? It's a bit hard to take seriously the claim that 'the human quest for the Divine' fails utterly as an explanatory category in a culture positively swarmingwith deities. While concerns about caste and pollution affect the ordering of the supernatural realm, one can hardly dismiss a priori the contention that this is a two-way street; for instance, caste is provided a supernatural warrant in the Rig- Veda. Dharma is itself a religious concept, at least by the theory of religion I mentioned above, and the claim that it is an 'ideological expression of hierarchy' is hardly self- evident -- though I expect there is some truth to it. Why not allow that a powerful religious vision (or collection of such visions) plays a role in shaping Hindu society? Above all, Fitzgerald fails to recognize that caste is itself a rel igious institution (a central part of a system of practices meant to place practitioners in a relation-of-value to a supermundane reality), one reason it is so very hard to uproot. This failure, I suspect, flows partly from his apparent conviction that the concept 'religion' is wedded essentially to 'Western' contrasts with 'society' and the 'secular'.

The book's third section, which concerns religion in Japan, argues in part that 'religion' is a category foisted on the Japanese in the last two centuries by Western countries. (In Part 4, concerning problems with the category 'culture', Fitzgerald responds to the concern that all concepts deployed in cross-cultural studies are defective.) Fitzgerald is an apt observer of Japanese culture, as evidenced by his discussion of Japanese baseball. He is also a gifted storyteller. Chapter 10, 'Bowing to the taxman', contains a beautifully crafted account of a Western friend's adventures with the Japanese national tax office, which culminate in his unexpected adoption as a member of Japanese society.

I fear that this review fails to do justice to the intelligence that informs Fitzgerald's writing. I frankly don't know whether religious studies can withstand fundamental criticism. Anyone interested in these matters will profit from reading The Ideology of Religious Studies. While unpersuaded by Fitzgerald's book, I am nervous that its thesis is true.

Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk (Hsuan Tsang) Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment by Richard Berstein.

2007-09-21T21:39:00.000-07:00

The Meaning of Life
By Alexander Frater
1201 words
25 March 2001
The New York Times
Page 6, Column 2
English
(c) 2001 New York Times Company

ULTIMATE JOURNEY

Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment. By Richard Bernstein.
352 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $26.

Every Chinese schoolkid knows about the monk Hsuan Tsang and his seventh-century odyssey through the fabled outer reaches of the world -- how he traveled for 17 years, covered 10,000 miles and brought home ideas about the attainment of serenity that would affect China profoundly. Tall, handsome and ferociously brainy, he had long been troubled by the complexities of the Buddhist Truth -- the ultimate reality that would free mankind from the treadmill of life and death. Buddhist texts indicated that such questions could be answered only in the distant, mythical land we now call India -- but in 629, as he prepared to leave, the emperor sealed the borders. Hsuan Tsang ignored the order. Determined to unravel the truth about human happiness, and with only a notional idea of which way to go -- basically west -- he vanished, subversively, into Asia.

Richard Bernstein, a book critic for The New York Times, first came across Hsuan Tsang's story while studying Chinese at Harvard, and again in Beijing as Time magazine's first bureau chief there. The idea of following in the monk's footsteps occurred in middle age when, working as a book reviewer, ''sitting at home pronouncing on the quality of other people's writings,'' he took stock: never married, Jewish but not particularly religious, comfortably off yet growing increasingly snappy and bored. Making Shaker furniture became one option, the other a journey along the fabled ''Road of Great Events.''

Bernstein's plans to travel in China were made more difficult when, along with a colleague, he wrote a polemic on United States-Chinese relations that put him at odds with Chinese authorities. His first request to obtain a visa was denied; he later got one by bypassing the Chinese consulate in New York and applying through a travel agency in Hong Kong. In the meantime, at a New York film screening, he met Zhongmei Li, a beautiful Chinese classical dancer who had recently moved to the States; she later offered to join him for the first leg of the trip. (In China he found, to his amusement, she was famous; occasionally, even, chauffeur-driven limos were laid on.)

Bernstein, as much of a clandestine traveler as Hsuan Tsang, writes about both journeys concurrently and, as we move through those huge, barren Asian landscapes (passing massifs like the Flaming Mountains) the specter of the monk always shimmers just ahead. In fact Hsuan Tsang is also leading Bernstein on a third quest -- into his ancient Asian religion and, in particular, its Yogacara, ''mind-only school''; a thousand years before Descartes and the British empirical philosophers, Buddhist scholars were proposing separation between the self and the world.

Hsuan Tsang's eventual destination was India's great Buddhist university at Nalanda, where students were taught that all was mind -- both the mind itself and every terrestrial thing that, seemingly, existed outside it. But if all is mind, then isn't that idea mind as well? Or if everything is illusion, isn't the proposition -- like a dream within a dream -- also an illusion? Isn't what we have, in fact, a kind of double emptiness?

''Not easy, is it?'' Bernstein sighs, casting around for a modern metaphor and coming up with the vacuum cleaner in the Beatles movie ''Yellow Submarine''; having sucked up everything in sight, it apocalyptically sucks itself out of existence. Double emptiness! Hsuan Tsang, he concludes, ''went to India to resolve the paradox of the 'Yellow Submarine' vacuum cleaner.''

America's unintentional bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade does not ease Bernstein's passage. Even before the bombing, the owner of a noodle shop in Jiayu Guan sees his open notebook and publicly accuses of him of spying. When Zhongmei has to leave for an important engagement, she worries about his safety. With that dodgy holiday visa in his passport, he carries on into the Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region -- off limits to journalists -- where he manages to talk his way out of China and into Kyrgyzstan. Reaching India, he meets its tumult head on: a tiny dark-eyed girl glimpsed in a rickshaw makes him yearn to give her ''a loving home and a rich American life''; the elderly Maharajah of Varanasi angers him by refusing an interview (''If you wanted to see Bill Clinton,'' the Maharajah grumbles, ''would you simply show up at his door?''); he has an anxiety attack in Varanasi's chaotic railway station -- the Indian dystopia in a kind of distilled form, horrible and fascinating.''

There are visits to Buddha's pastoral birthplace at Lumbini; to Sarnath, where he preached his first sermon; and to Bodhgaya, where he found enlightenment (and where Bernstein saw a banner reading ''COCA-COLA WELCOMES HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA''). Nearby, somewhere among Nalanda's spectacular ruins, Hsuan Tsang was welcomed by a crowd of thousands and given a daily ration of rice, betel nuts, nutmegs and camphor for the duration of his triumphant stay.

But what was Hsuan Tsang looking for? Perhaps confirmation that the world was ''like the moon reflected in the water'' (his words) but, more likely, mastery of the vast Buddhist canon. In Bodhgaya, pondering the rigorous metaphysics of the Diamond Sutra, Bernstein asks a German monk for help. It's all to do with selflessness, the German tells him, the realization that ''the object of your self-attachment is an illusion.'' That was how you began attaining Buddhahood.

In Delhi, to Bernstein's delight, Zhongmei rejoins him. As they follow Hsuan Tsang's homeward path over the breathtaking Kunjerab Pass, Bernstein already knows that Buddhism doesn't hold the answer to his questions (though he continues to leaf through its texts ''looking for the Truth that cannot be expressed in words''). What his odyssey left, instead, was a profound reverence for the Buddhist civilization of the seventh century.

The monk's own account of his journey, ''The Great Tang Chronicles of the Western World,'' is a Chinese literary classic. Bernstein's wonderful book, which ranks with Robert Byron's ''Road to Oxiana'' (1937), deserves to become a classic in its own right. If the best traveler's tales are really voyages through the mind of the author, then here we have a very cerebral story indeed -- intricate, closely argued and beautifully observed -- by a man who, driven as much by the quiet despair of middle age as by a search for deeper meaning, seems finally to have achieved something close to a state of grace. And ''Ultimate Journey'' ends on a note that would have brought a smile to the face of the monk. In an author's note on the book's final page, we read that last September Bernstein and Zhongmei Li . . . well, read it and find out for yourself.

Another review of Armstrong's book 'Buddha"

2007-09-21T21:37:00.001-07:00

BOOK REVIEW An Inspiring Look at the Life of the Buddha BUDDHA By Karen Armstrong; Viking / Lipper; $19.95, 206 pages
PETER CLOTHIER
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES; Peter Clothier is the author of "While I Am Not Afraid: Secrets of a Man's Heart."
861 words
24 February 2001
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
B-2
English
Copyright 2001 / The Times Mirror Company

Any study of the Buddha's life, as Karen Armstrong is quick to point out in this new biography from the Penguin Lives series, might seem antithetical to the essence of Buddhism, which is for each of us to take nothing on faith--not even the Buddha--and to discover the true spiritual path through our own efforts. But the attempt is still worthwhile, she notes, since "his life and teaching were inextricably combined. His was an essentially autobiographical philosophy."

The historical facts of Siddhatta Gotama's life (I follow Armstrong's use of the Pali, rather than the more familiar Sanskrit, orthography) are entangled in the surrounding myth and legend. The scriptures that make up the Pali Canon, the chief source of our knowledge, are based on oral transmission of discourses by the Buddha himself and on practices created by the monks who codified the dhamma--his teachings and practice--into the religion now known as Buddhism. Though the texts contain some verifiable historical material, they were not written down until several hundred years after the Buddha's death--which occurred in 483 BC, by most Western dating--and are thus subject to the distortions of time as well as of human intention, perception and prejudice.

Though not as well known in our culture as the story of Jesus, there are elements in the Buddha's story that are now widely familiar: how he was born into a princely family and isolated by a fiercely protective father from the sufferings of life beyond the walls of his pleasure palace, and from the prospect of sickness and old age; how, as a young man, he stole out into the city and was horrified when confronted with the reality of suffering and death; how he then abruptly abandoned his sleeping wife and son and set off to discover the answer to life's painful mysteries; how years of study, then of futile fasting and self-denial in the forest led to his discovery of the "Middle Way" between self-indulgence and asceticism, denial and aversion; and how he eventually achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi tree.

Around the bare bones of this story Armstrong weaves a rich texture of historical, religious and cultural information, creating a full portrait of the Buddha, both as a man of his time and as a great spiritual pioneer. First initiated in a sangha, or a school that taught that human suffering derived from ignorance of our true selves and that "the Self was eternal and identical with the Absolute Spirit," Gotama soon reached the limits of this direction. For him, Armstrong writes, "the teachings remained remote, metaphysical abstractions." He was looking not for theories, but for results; not for an understanding of transcendence as a means to conquer samsara, the cycle of suffering, but for a way to experience it in his own life.

Armstrong's clear and consistently insightful story shows how Gotama assembled parts of his answer from a complex of ideas and practices that were in common currency in his time, testing each for its practical application to his purpose. She devotes ample attention to her discussion of contemporaneous religious teachings about dukkha (suffering) and kamma (actions, better known to us in its Sanskrit form, karma)--and rebirth. And she reviews the role of the twin disciplines of yoga and meditation as paths to mindfulness, vital spiritual ingredients in the Buddha's achievement of enlightenment and proven ways "to break free of the conditioning that characterized the human personality, and to cancel the constraints of time and place that limit our perception." By the time we reach the Bodhi tree, we are ready to appreciate the full significance of the Four Noble Truths that form the basis of Buddhist practice, and for the compassionate wisdom of the Eightfold Path, the guiding precepts leading to release from suffering.

Less well known are the 45 years that followed the period of intense activity during which the Buddha's own sangha of monks expanded exponentially. Armstrong evokes a bustling life of travel to numerous cities and courts, of constant preaching and conversion. She details rifts in the sangha, lively dissents and rivalries, even assassination attempts on the Buddha's life as he approached its end, and offers a moving account of his last days, as he increasingly sought solitude and serenity for his parinibbana, or final release from the cycle of rebirth. Her book is a good, solid read, which respects both the integrity and the complexity of the Buddha's teaching, and offers a frequently inspiring look into this exemplary life. This is an invaluable text for all those seeking a better understanding of a spiritual movement whose influence continues to spread astonishingly today, 2,500 years after its founder's death.

Buddha By Karen Armstrong, reviewed by T. F. RIGELHOF

2007-09-21T21:34:00.000-07:00

Buddha bio enlightens
T. F. RIGELHOF
1244 words
24 February 2001
The Globe and Mail
Metro
D10
English
"All material Copyright (c) Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved."

Buddha By Karen Armstrong Viking, 205 pages $28.95

'If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha!"

This, the command of a ninth-century Zen master to his disciples some 1,300 years after the death of the Buddha, is the quandary any biographer of Sidhatta Gotama must face. Throughout his life, Gotama, the man who became Buddha, insisted that it was his teaching that was important and that his teaching would not and could not be grasped by those who attended to his life and his personality. He believed that he had woken up to a truth, a dhamma, a fundamental law of life that rendered egotism obsolete. If people revered Gotama the man, they would distract themselves from following the path to immunity and peace in the middle of life's suffering.

A further 13 centuries after that Zen master spoke, Karen Armstrong, who has demonstrated that she understands so much so thoroughly in Judaism, Christianity and Islam throughout the past decade in a series of brilliant books that includes A History of God, Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths and The Battle for God, performs a wonderful sleight of hand in turning east to the Ganges plain of the fifth century before our era. She brings Gotama to life only to make the Buddha disappear back into his teaching: In the process, she enriches our understanding of just how autobiographical his philosophy is and how much more radical he is than those "positive thinkers" among us who "bury our heads in the sand, deny the ubiquity of pain in ourselves and others, and . . . immure ourselves in a state of deliberate heartlessness to ensure . . . emotional survival."

Although the Buddhist scriptures (the Tipikata or Pali canon) are faithful to the spirit of Gotama's teaching, they do tell us some things about the details of his life and personality that seem reliable, and a great deal more about North India during his lifetime that agrees with external evidence. The first Buddhists thought deeply about five key moments in their founder's life: his infancy, his renunciation of normal domestic life, his enlightenment, the start of his teaching career and his death -- and this becomes the template for Armstrong's Buddha. For his first followers, as for his latest biographer, the general contour of his life is both an inspiration and a model: "Like Jesus, Muhammad, and Socrates, the Buddha was teaching men and women . . . how to reach beyond human pettiness and expediency and discover an absolute value."

What's more, the mass of teachings assembled in the Pali canon, a century after his death, "has a consistency and a coherence that point to a single original intelligence. . . . It is not at all impossible that some of these words were really uttered by Sidhatta Gotama, even though we cannot be certain which they are." That said, "what is historical is the fact of the legend," not the facts themselves, and Armstrong perceives correctly that to understand any of the legend, it must be looked at in its fullness, complete with all its "signs and wonders."

Her previous work on the Torah and the Gospels has taught Armstrong that "miracle stories" are often cautionary tales that point to an obsession with "significance" that rivals our modern concern with "accuracy." So what we have within 200 pages of highly readable and penetrating prose is not the Buddha in full, but a fully Buddhist Gotama, a recreation of his life, teaching and legend that can be recommended both as the best available introduction for newcomers and as the clearest and most precise statement in English of familiar teachings for those long-practiced in the art of piecing them together from inadequately translated texts and commentaries.

Either a contemporary of Confucius (551-479 BC) or, as recent scholarship asserts as more likely, of Socrates (469-399 BC), Sidhatta Gotama was born in a period of rapid transition from rural to urban, agricultural to commercial, traditional to innovative, mythological to pragmatic culture. North India during the sixth and fifth centuries BC was gripped by political violence, corruption, anomie and a profound fear of the emerging mercantile order.

At the age of 29, Gotama walked away from a wife to whom he was attached, a son only a few days old and a very comfortable life as the son of one of the leading men of Kapilavatthu, because he had experienced no pleasure in the birth of his son. He cast off the whole of his life, shaved his head and beard, put on a yellow robe and joined a growing number of forest-dwelling ascetics who were pursuing a life of homelessness. He was an empiricist and he'd reasoned to himself that if there was "birth, aging, illness, death, sorrow and corruption" in life, these states must have positive counterparts in another mode of existence and that it was up to him to find "the unborn, the unaging, unailing, deathless, sorrowless, incorrupt and supreme freedom from this bondage." He called this wholly satisfactory state of being Nibbana -- "blowing out" -- and was convinced that it was entirely natural to human beings and could be experienced by any genuine seeker.

Gotama made his way to Vesali, where he was initiated in the dhamma of Alara Kalama, who taught a form of Samkhya-Yoga, which instructed its practitioners to find enlightenment anywhere and everywhere in this world. Armstrong is very good at showing what elements of Samkhya are retained in the Buddha's teaching and how the traditional yoga he practised was both very different from the various yogas generally promoted in Europe and North America these days, and how crucial its systematic dismantling of egotism was to the meditation that led Gotama finally to the enlightenment he experienced under the boghi tree in the grove now known as Bodh Gaya, some eight years after leaving his home.

Any book on the Buddha rises or falls not with a description of Gotama's enlightenment, but rather with the analysis of the method he began to teach and propagate in his first three great sermons -- a method that means nothing of what he intended if it's separated from its effects on the moral conduct of those who practise it. Armstrong's Buddha doesn't just rise -- it soars! -- when she delineates why the Buddha's Four Noble Truths appealed to so many, and precisely how they provided a compassionate offensive against the rampant self-centredness that had begun to prevail in a new society made aggressive by a market-driven economy.

In tracing the social changes the followers of the Buddha brought (and still bring) to cultures that have begun to cut off human beings from all non-materialistic impulses, Armstrong nimbly makes the case that what Gotama wished to promote is nowhere better expressed than in the Digha Nikaya:

Let all beings be happy! Weak or strong, of high, middle or low estate,

small or great, visible or invisible, near or far away,

alive or still to be born -- may they be entirely happy!

Let nobody lie to anybody or despise any single being anywhere.

May nobody wish harm to any single creature, out of anger or hatred!

An expat living in Chinese temples

2007-09-19T02:37:00.001-07:00

Religion BOOK REVIEW Living a Monk's Life at Chinese Temples in a Quest to Expand the Soul JOURNEY TO HEAVENLY MOUNTAIN: An American's Pilgrimage to the Heart of Buddhism in Modern China; By Jay Martin; Hohm Press: 244 pp., $16.95 paper
MIKE MEYER
Mike Meyer is a writer at work on a memoir of his travels through the Middle Kingdom.
961 words
22 June 2002
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
B-20
English
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times

Daytime visitors to China's Buddhist temples often walk away feeling anything but spiritually cleansed. Fleeced is more like it. The nation's ancient religious tradition, the Communist Party's official atheism and a burgeoning market economy have produced a wealth of restored temples that are at once revered, rebuked and revenue-generating.

At night, however, Chinese temples become themselves again, or at least the best version of themselves that they can. After the tour buses depart and the stall-holders pack up, the smell of incense overpowers that of cash; tranquillity replaces bustle.

It took me years of living in China to realize that temples should be seen on overnight visits--that they are still religious sanctuaries, not museums and fun fairs. Jay Martin is a much quicker study.

In 1998, the Claremont McKenna College professor embarked on a summer-long stay in southeastern China's temples, a bit of spiritual tourism documented in "Journey to Heavenly Mountain." Unlike most recent books about China, "Journey" is neither a travelogue nor memoir of the country's rapid economic evolution, but of its spiritual one. "I haven't come to look at [China], but to be a part of it," he writes.

Yet the people and places Martin encounters and describes so precisely--from venerable masters on mist-shrouded mountains to island-bound, angelic tour guides and devilish boatmen--are only part of the tale. "Journey" is about Martin's own quest to expand his soul by merging into the breaths of the multitudes around him--including those who turn temples into tourist traps.

At his first stop, at Lingyin, the Temple of Inspired Seclusion, he is momentarily taken aback by what feels like Disneyland mixed with Notre Dame. A travel writer would stop the account there. Yet Martin is after more than a description, a simile and segue to the next adventure.

"I could easily be cynical about Lingyin," he admits. "But actually being plunged into it without preparation and premeditation makes me see that I myself, and all of us, are put together in the same way--a bit of commerce here, some shallow pleasures there, old memories, new desires, new landscapes along with ancient plantings, and all fused with an authentic heart and a sacred soul--we are made of such assemblages. I came to China to live in Buddhist monasteries and revisit my soul. But I see here, right at the outset, that my quest is much more complicated than I thought.... I realize that if I am to find myself at all, it must be in the multitudes and varieties that I possess, the shallow along with the deep, and my very human, superficial desires along with my yearning for a bottomless divinity."

Martin ensconces himself in the life of a monk, taking residence in temples for two months, rising at 3 in the morning to pray. "I am content. Warm, drawn in, bowing and kneeling, following the group. The chanting begins, I am a Buddhist now. Then it is over. But--of course--not over, since it will resume tomorrow and never end until the world does. And if the Buddhists are right, the world will never end."

The monks accept him as part of the community. That Martin is an American matters none; some monks aver that he lived at the temple in a past life and came back. Nor does it matter that the order's newest monk is Catholic. A colleague reasons, "Catholics are on their way to becoming Buddhists. You are just a little bit ahead of other Catholics in the journey."

Buddhism, an abbot explains, holds that to reach the Buddha inside ourselves, we must enlarge our kind heart by cleansing ourselves of desires. Martin asks what desire is most difficult to give up.

"Beauty, the beauty of women," replies the 71-year-old monk.

Another abbot confesses that his greatest desire is his computer, which he uses to download the spiritual precepts called sutras.

"The desire to possess the attractions of society," says another. Others say it's the desire to understand quickly and the wish to rise above people.

For Martin, the question vexes him. How can he read a book, for instance, without desiring to read?

By the end of "Journey to Heavenly Mountain," Martin realizes that his deepest desire is the same one which drives the reader to turn the page: to find out more. Yet he has no intention of giving it up, for he concludes that "desires are inseparably woven into the mottled tapestry of life." And the soul was not what he thought it was, nor is China some enormous refueling stop where one can top off the spiritual tank merely by pulling in and opening one's wallet: "A talk with a tree can bring as fine a vision as an expensive journey to consult the wisest man in the farthest reaches of the universe."

Like the earthworm with which he boasts conversing on a forest walk, Martin burrows deeper and more expansively than the creature's form suggests. The worm doesn't get to respond, but the dozens of Chinese that the author meets do. It is these touching encounters that teach him, and us, the most about the soul; and they make "Journey to Heavenly Mountain" a rare, refreshing temple trip.

BUDDHADASA: Theravada Buddhism and Modernist Reform in Thailand By Peter Jackson

2007-09-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

BOOK REVIEW - Rethinking Buddhism.
1056 words
15 March 2003
Bangkok Post
3
English
(c) 2003

A revolutionary religious thinker and his complex legacy

Chris Baker

BUDDHADASA: Theravada Buddhism and Modernist Reform in Thailand By Peter Jackson, Silkworm Books, 2003, 625 baht.

In 1931, a young monk failed his clerical exams, and got fed up with "blundering around studying the scriptures in a way polluted by concern for status." He quit his Bangkok wat, buried himself in the forests of his native Surat, and set out to reinterpret the earliest Buddhist texts.

This was strikingly ambitious. The whole Theravada tradition is built on the sanctity of the texts. No significant commentary had been written for over a millennium. Scholar monks were supposed to preserve the texts in their purest form, not try to change the view of what they meant.

The results were as revolutionary as the project. Buddhadasa invented a method (phasa khon-phasa tham) which claimed to find the higher meaning buried in the original statements of the early texts. With this, he made three major propositions.

First, he interpreted all mentions of heavens, hells and rebirths to mean simply psychological states. By doing so, he rejected mystery and supernaturalism and could claim that Buddhism was rational and consistent with modern science.

Next, Buddhadasa argued that the original human condition was not characterised by sinful desire (kilesa) but by a "void mind" (chit wang). The purpose of Buddhist practice was to recover that state. Moreover, that was not so difficult and certainly not possible only by monks and through strenuous asceticism. Lay people could do it too, using simple insight meditation. Besides, the ultimate goal of nibbana was no more than a deepening of this "void mind".

Finally, without a concept of rebirth, the whole notion of storing up merit for a future life no longer had any meaning. This world became the whole deal. So the duty of a good Buddhist should be to create a world in which more people have a chance to attain nibbana.

With these propositions, Buddhadasa had done a lot. He had created an interpretation of Buddhism which could coexist with modern science. He had paved the way for lay people to participate fully in Buddhist practice and even attain nibbana. He had indicated that the proper duty of a good Buddhist was not to escape this world but to improve it.

Buddhadasa's ideas met a demand among a new educated elite who feared that old-fashioned Buddhism would whither in the face of modernity, and who sought religious justification for greater social and political activism.

But the political and social implications were huge. Along the way, Buddhadasa had delegitimised the whole business of acquiring merit for a future life, which is the focus of most everyday religious practice. He also undermined the traditional thinking which justified the rule of the king and the existence of social hierarchy, in terms of unequal merit.

Buddhadasa had achieved his new interpretation with a lot of difficulty. He had to cherry-pick his texts. He had to slide past some statements attributed to the Buddha which seemed to deny his psychological interpretation. He had to borrow from other Buddhist traditions, especially Zen. This laid him open to attack from conservatives who bridled at the idea of any such reinterpretation, and who especially feared the political implications. They branded Buddhadasa as a Mahayanist Trojan horse who would destroy the Theravada tradition.

Perhaps because of these attacks, and perhaps because of the deeply divided ideological politics of the 1960s and 1970s, Buddhadasa disappointed his followers by backing away from the political and social implications of his ideas. He rejected the competition at the heart of democracy and argued that an ideal political state (dhammocracy) was most likely to be achieved under a (benevolent) dictator. He opposed monks getting involved in politics and development. To minimise personal attacks, he stuck closely to traditional clerical practice and steered clear of politics inside the Sangha. Hence he offered no new guide for the monkhood in line with his new doctrine.

Peter Jackson originally published this book in 1984 when Buddhadasa was still alive, and when the prime minister was still a general. He concluded then that Buddhadasa was an inspirational thinker, but that his appeal would be limited to a "tiny minority" of educated activists.

But in the epilogue, originally written in 1994 and here slightly updated, Jackson modifies this view. Since Buddhadasa's 1993 death (described in the epilogue), his legacy has become much more complex. A host of followers both inside the monkhood (Phra Payom, Santikaro Bhikkhu, P.A. Payutto) and outside (Sulak, Prawase, Chamlong) have fine-tuned the socio-political implications of his thinking, and put them into practice in their own lives.

A new and much larger generation of activists has taken up Buddhadasa's message of this-worldly commitment. Some commentators have used Buddhadasa's rationalism as foundations for supporting capitalist modernism, while others interpret his ideas as the basis for a sophisticated opposition to capitalism.

The King's involvement in Buddhadasa's funeral has blunted some of the conservative opposition. And in the popular tradition, Buddhadasa has been embraced as a great monk and attributed the supernatural powers he was so keen to deny. Buddhadasa's retreat at Suan Mokh has become one of the nation's most famous religious centres.

This book is a reissue but very welcome. With his philosophical background, Peter Jackson takes us through the logic of Buddhadasa's thinking with great clarity. Through his readiness to put religion in its social and political context, he shows exactly how and why Buddhadasa's ideas matter. By here reproducing the 1984 edition (along with his later comments on it), he shows how much society, politics and religion in Thailand have changed in the tumultuous years since.

The book is indispensable background to all the swirling religious currents of today, from the Dhammakai phenomenon, through the political roles of figures like Prawase Wasi and Chirmsak Pinthong, to the turmoil over the Sangha Bill.

Regrettably buried in the endnotes, he quotes the thinker's farewell poem, Buddhadasa will never die:

"Treat me as if I never died,

As though I am with you all as before.

Speak up whatever is on your minds

As if I sit with you helping point out the facts.

Realise the Absolute and stop dying."

A new meditation on love by JEANNE MALMGREN

2007-09-14T23:56:00.000-07:00

FLORIDIAN
A new meditation on love
JEANNE MALMGREN
1014 words
13 February 2003
St. Petersburg Times
SOUTH PINELLAS
1D
English
Copyright 2003 St. Petersburg Times.

Zen and the Art of Falling in Love

By Brenda Shoshanna

Are you a "hungry ghost"? One of those poor souls who wanders from relationship to relationship, never quite getting your fill of love, always wondering what went wrong, starving for the very thing that's right in front of you, laid out on the banquet table of life?

What you need, Romance Junkie, is your own personal Zen master/shrink. Someone who will listen to your problems, then crack you over the head with a long stick. Or - here's the cheaper, less painful option - you could get a copy of Brenda Shoshanna's new book, Zen and the Art of Falling in Love (Simon & Schuster, $21, 224 pages).

Despite the silly title and the oh-so-subtle marketing ploy of releasing the book right before Valentine's Day, there's some good, solid advice here that just might help the lovelorn break some of their destructive patterns and connect the dots as to why true love is always passing them by.

Of course, relationship self-help guides are a dime a dozen, so the savvy author has to find a hook to make his or her book stand out from the crowd. Shoshanna's shtick is Zen, which she has practiced for 28 years. (She founded the Gateless Zendo in New York City and teaches meditation there on Monday nights.)

But hey, wait a minute. This seems like an oxymoron. What does Zen - austere, silent Zen, the practice of nonattachment - have to do with love, breathless, giddy love, the very definition of attachment?

Everything, says Shoshanna: "Zen and love are incredibly compatible. The wonderful, ancient practice of Zen is actually the practice of falling in love. When one focuses on and welcomes all that life brings, each day becomes a good day in which you are able to fall in love with all of life, to continually find wonder, kindness, friendship and playfulness."

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That still doesn't explain why you haven't found your soul mate yet. And why so many losers keep auditioning for the part.

This is where Shoshanna slips on her psychotherapist hat. (She has been a psychologist for almost as long as she has studied Zen, and she's quite the Internet counselor, offering online couples' courses, live chats on iVillage.com and her own e-zine called "Touchstones to Love.")

The problem, she says, is that we're always looking for answers through love. Solutions to our problems. We search for the person who'll somehow magically fix it all, who will, to quote Tom Cruise, "complete" us.

And that, according to Shoshanna, is a major mistake.

In Zen, she points out, you're all alone on the cushion. You sit there, you keep your eyes on the floor, you follow the instructor's orders to count your breaths from one to 10. It's simple, and yet it's profoundly difficult to surrender, to sit still. If nothing else, you learn patience.

Using the most elementary of Zen lessons, Shoshanna draws parallels between what happens in the zendo and what happens in the jungle of romance. Or what should happen. "Take Off Your Shoes" means becoming available, giving oneself up to the process, paying attention to the tiniest details. "Doing Nothing" means releasing control, giving up the illusion that we can make a partner act how we'd like them to act. "Receiving the Stick" means absorbing blows, resisting the urge to run when a relationship hits a rough patch.

All of which might sound pretty negative to someone not familiar with Buddhism and its emphasis on selflessness, on the freedom to be gained by letting go. But hey, says Shoshanna, life - and, by extension, love - is often about not getting your way. Deal with it.

"In Zen practice, the sorrow, shocks and imbalances of life are not seen as an illness. They are not bad, things to be avoided, but rather are to be understood and welcomed as one would welcome a temporary guest. They are not dwelled upon or figured out. They are simply known to be the unavoidable fluctuations of life, like day and night, sun and clouds."

The last section of the book, "Advanced Training," is about how to stay in love once you've fallen. A relationship, according to Shoshanna, is like sesshin, the intensive weeklong retreat during which Zen students give up responsibilities of the outside world and devote themselves to meditation, hour after hour. Settling down on the cushion; settling down with one partner. Almost everybody finds this hard. We fidget, struggle with boredom, endure stiff knees, entertain fantasies of leaving. Some people actually do leave. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't.

Shoshanna recounts an old Zen story of the student who went to visit a revered master, hoping for a great teaching, something that would deliver instant enlightenment. Instead, the master offered him some tea and put a kettle on the stove. It took awhile for the water to boil. Teacher and student watched the kettle. When the water was ready, the Zen master poured two cups of tea. They drank in silence.

Finally the student put down his cup. "Are you finished?" the master asked.

"Yes," said the student.

"Fine. Now wash your cup."

That kind of simplicity, that attention to detail, will sustain a relationship, Shoshanna assures us. But it has to come from you, not from that perfect partner who has arrived at last.

"The ability to love and to be present is entirely up to you. Whoever is seated beside you, or whoever appears on your path, is part of the amazing manifestation of life. Why can't we accept and revere it? Why can't we offer all a beautifully prepared cup of tea?"

Maybe we can, if we're ready to stop being hungry ghosts.

Jeanne Malmgren's first book, which she co-wrote with a Buddhist monk, will be published this fall by Wisdom Publications.

Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead; By Francesca Fremantle

2007-09-14T23:44:00.000-07:00

Religion BOOK REVIEW For Serious Seekers, an Expert Guide to Revered Buddhist Text LUMINOUS EMPTINESS: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead; By Francesca Fremantle; Shambhala: 408 pp., $26.95
RUTH ANDREW ELLENSON
878 words
9 March 2002
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
B-18
English
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times

Would the Tibetan Book of the Dead by any other name be as popular? That's one question that Francesca Fremantle's thoughtful and intricate "Luminous Emptiness" brings to mind.

The real title for what we call the Tibetan Book of the Dead is the less melodic "The Great Liberation Through Hearing During the Bardo." Fremantle's book attempts to be no less than a guide for maintaining one's perceptions and awareness during the bardo (or transitional state between life and death) in which she shows readers the complicated process of understanding one of Buddhism's most sacred texts.

One surprising aspect of Fremantle's revelations about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, written by "the precious guru" Padmakara in the 8th century, is that the book is not so much a guide to the afterlife as a guide for the stages of life in preparation for death. Death, she asserts, is not the end of existence but a passage into a more evolved state of consciousness, similar to what is achieved in transcendent meditative states: "After death, without the grounding influence of the physical body, events will overtake us with such speed and intensity that there will be no chance to stop and meditate. To be of use, meditation must become part of our innermost nature. That is why this is a book of the living as well as a book of the dead."

"Luminous emptiness" is the space between life and death before rebirth. "Space is emptiness and luminosity: luminous emptiness," Fremantle says. "Because it is empty, nothing exists, yet because it is luminous, everything arises from it." Though this description might seem elusive--and, indeed, it is this language that makes Eastern religions hard for many Western critics to grasp--it describes a state of spiritual bliss with abstract language that forces the reader to let go of a rational, linear thought process.

A British scholar of Sanskrit and Tibetan, Fremantle helped translate the Tibetan Book of the Dead in the 1970s with her teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, to whom this book is dedicated. Fremantle is a student of Indian Buddhism--the purest form of which, according to her, is practiced in Tibet. The struggle to arrive at a state of enlightenment is palpable in the meticulous and detailed manner in which Fremantle lays out its spiritual path. She begins with a concise explanation of the fundamentals of Buddhism and then moves on to the more complex ideas of karma, self-deceit, the immaterial, the ego and consciousness.

Fremantle acts as our intellectual guide, unraveling the book's complicated and powerful imagery and abstract messages. For example, she presents this daunting passage dealing with the moment of death:

*

Now the bardo of dying is dawning upon me,

I will abandon grasping, attachment and the all-desiring mind,

Enter undistracted the clear essence of instructions,

And transfer into the space of unborn self-awareness,

As I leave this conditioned body of flesh and blood

I will know it to be a transitory illusion.

*

Then she explains how this passage treats dying as a transference, not an end, like moving from "one place to another," just as one would move from one room in a house into another. In skillfully unraveling such knotted imagery and symbolic meaning, Fremantle points to the meanings that each passage contains.

Her description of Buddhism makes no bones about it: "Buddhism is a religion of practical methods for spiritual realization." Every religion might make the same claim, but Fremantle argues that Buddhism provides the unique ability to provide those steps without being dogmatic. "[Buddhism] contains many different views and formulations in response to people's needs and a huge variety of techniques to suit their inclinations and capabilities. Some of these may appear contradictory, yet they do not teach different truths; they present different points of view from which to approach the same truth."

"Luminous Emptiness" differs from some Western books on religion--it is not an anthropological study, or even an academic explanation, that tries to simplify concepts for an unfamiliar general audience. Instead, this book is a deeply heartfelt guide to spiritual fulfillment through Buddhism, and the work of a believer who has studied her tradition with academic intensity and whose faith has emerged on the other end, undiminished.

The reader who comes to "Luminous Emptiness" with a predisposition toward believing in Buddhism, and a desire to understand how to use the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a way of furthering that knowledge, will be rewarded. However, readers who come with only a passing interest in the subject and seek a convincing argument for taking on the Tibetan Book of the Dead will perhaps find Fremantle's work less than illuminating. Not a book for the casual reader, "Luminous Emptiness" provides interested seekers with a journey through the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Fremantle is an expert guide.

A 16th Century Mystic's Meditation on His Sensual 'Songs of the Soul' by Nora Gallagher

2007-09-14T23:33:00.000-07:00

RELIGION BOOK REVIEW A 16th Century Mystic's Meditation on His Sensual 'Songs of the Soul'
NORA GALLAGHER
Nora Gallagher is the author of the memoir "Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith."
1074 words
9 February 2002
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
B-20
English
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times

"Dark Night of the Soul"

St. John of the Cross

Translated from the Spanish

by Mirabai Starr

Riverhead Books, 184 pg., $22.95

As the last rites were read to him on his deathbed at the age of 49, John of the Cross, the 16th century poet, mystic, priest and monk, interrupted. Please, he begged, read me "The Song of Solomon."

That such a sensual, luscious poem to love would be the last words John wished to hear is a bittersweet commentary on his life. He was a member of Teresa of Avila's Discalced Carmelite Order--the Barefoot Carmelites--and Teresa's beloved, passionate friend. His finest and most famous poem, "Songs of the Soul," combines the best of each of his vocations. He and Teresa were committed to the reform of the Carmelites, and both of them were caught in the chaos of the Inquisition in Spain.

At 25, John was captured and imprisoned in a closet in a monastery by a community of monks who upheld a Vatican faction's dim view of Teresa's reforms. He was starved and flogged. After nine months of captivity, he escaped by lowering himself out of his cell with a rope made of strips of cloth. He got himself to a Discalced convent and wept as he heard the nuns reciting the Angelus. He wrote "Songs of the Soul" in a state of gratitude and ecstasy.

The poem is a mere eight verses long. It describes a night in which a soul escapes from her house to join her lover, her creator, in a night of risk, ecstasy and passion. As with the Song of Songs and many mystics' writings, it is not only beautiful, it is remarkably sensual. Consider the seventh verse:

Wind blew down from the tower

Parting the locks of his hair

With his gentle hand

He wounded my neck

And all my senses were suspended.

John's Discalced brethren prevailed on him to write a "commentary" on his poem, and this resulted in what we now know as the "Dark Night of the Soul." The commentary is 25 chapters long, divided into two parts, "Night of Sense" and "Night of the Spirit," an exegesis of the first three verses of the poem (nothing remains, if it ever existed, of the commentary on the last five).

In these pages, John describes how and why the soul must risk entering darkness, become empty and abandoned, to be ready for union, real union, with God. It's partly a step-by-step guide to contemplation and has served as solace for those who suffer from a dry or despairing season in meditation or prayer. It's wise and often witty about spiritual seekers: our love of trinkets and icons, how attached we get to juicy spiritual experiences, how competitive we are about our lives of prayer.

For the last 400 years, "Dark Night of the Soul" has been taken very seriously by contemplatives. Writes Thomas Moore in his introduction, "As I see it, St. John of the Cross is speaking of mysterious developments in the soul, which includes the psychological.... His goal is not health, but union with the divine."

At the same time, however, the commentary flattens and devitalizes the poem. While the poem celebrates sensuality, the commentary argues against it. It attacks the urgency, the moment of the poem. The poem and the commentary are like a war between the imaginary and the literal, the mystical and the dogmatic.

Poems are mysterious. So is mystical experience. We don't know where their inspiration comes from. To write a serious poem or to enter into prayer is to enter into darkness. Because they come from a place "outside the writer," poems, even those written 400 years ago, have the capacity to speak to us, in the now. And mystics, including Julian of Norwich and the 13th century Sufi poet Rumi are presently speaking to large numbers of us.

Most mystics, from Mechthildof Magdeburg to John of the Cross, experience God as a creative, sensual, intimate lover. This version of God makes people, especially those in authority, very nervous: Many mystics, most of them women, who insisted on this God, so different from the remote Father in Heaven, were banned, imprisoned and even killed.

St. Hildegard of Bingen, another early Christian mystic, said in one of her revelations that our sin is not that we are sensuous but that we are not sensuous enough: We do not allow the beauty of the world and the flesh to fully enchant us. It is the poem, not the commentary, that brings us close to John's actual experience of God.

Yet the poem and the commentary are linked forever. As a friend, a former Ursulan nun who studied John of the Cross at Notre Dame, said, "the commentary is like a provenance" to the poem, a place of origin, the place where a thing is made.

John's commentary anchors the metaphysics of his poem in the struggle that led to its creation. It shows us the place where the poem was made, and this, finally, is what gives this work its greatness.

This new translation by Mirabai Starr, a fiction writer and adjunct professor of philosophy, religious studies and Spanish at the University of New Mexico at Taos, is the first translation of John from someone "outside the church," as the publisher puts it, meaning the first translation by someone who is not Roman Catholic.

Her translation is somewhat like Coleman Barks' reading of Rumi: more plain speaking, less ornate and designed to appeal to a secular, or at least nonreligious, audience.

Starr's own spiritual "seeking'' has led her from Hinduism to Buddhism to Native American sweat lodges. "But eventually the juices drained out of my spiritual practices and the fireworks faded. By the time I reached my thirties, nothing remained but a quiet connection to emptiness." "Dark Night of the Soul" is Starr's silent companion.

Sparks of the Divine: Finding Inspiration in Our Everyday World by Drew Leder

2007-09-05T03:36:00.000-07:00

Religion
BOOK REVIEW Scholar offers tips to finding sacred in life
BY ROBERT NERALICH SPECIAL TO THE DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
759 words
27 November 2004
The Arkansas Democrat Gazette
50
English
Copyright (c) 2004 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.

In the opinion of Drew Leder, professor of Western and Eastern philosophy at Loyola College in Maryland, human beings fail to see the world's sacred dimension because "The sheer ordinariness of things is our cataract. We view our world through a glaze of familiar tasks and objects."

Therefore, his ambition in Sparks of the Divine: Finding Inspiration in Our Everyday World is to help readers rediscover this sacredness by looking at common objects in uncommon ways.

The book's title derives from Kabbalah, a mystical branch of Judaism, according to which, "Every particle in our physical universe, every structure and every being is a shell that contains sparks of holiness." To assist his readers in locating these sparks, Leder has written his book in the form of "one hundred brief reflections," in which he borrows spiritual insights from many religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and American Indian traditions.

He also includes "15 guided meditations" that he calls "shapeshifts," designed to "further the book's use as a transformative tool" by allowing readers to shift "into the heart of another being," or, as he expresses it in his epilogue: "It is good to consult with creature-teachers; it can be better to turn into them and absorb their wisdom from within."

In essence, Sparks of the Divine is an extended invitation to investigate the claim of 19th-century Hasidic teacher Menahem Mendel, cited by Leder, that "One who does not see the Omnipresent in every place will not see Him in any place."

It is therefore appropriate that Leder discovers the sacred dimension in a variety of decidedly humble objects not generally associated with spiritual pursuits, such as frogs, ducks, belly buttons, fire hydrants, pencils, windshield wipers and bubble gum. His analogies in these discussions are always interesting, and the questions they generate are sometimes as startling as they are thought-provoking, as when, after stating that many people hold opinions on what God looks and sounds like, he asks, "What does God smell like?"

A few examples will serve to demonstrate the textures of Leder's considerable intelligence and imagination. He suggests that driving an automobile provides motorists with numerous opportunities for spiritual practice, since he believes that there is "no better way to exorcise your demons of impatience, pride and selfishness."

He cleverly compares the way in which magnets affect iron with the manner in which a saint can influence his students: "The disorganized impulses of the disciple - generous at one moment, selfish the next - begin to unify like electrons spinning in the same direction."

He also argues in a reflection called "Sudden Death Playoffs" that viewing sports can be a form of yoga, by suggesting that individuals should "try watching the game prayerfully, or as a form of meditation, and working with the intensity of the desires and emotions that arise."

Sometimes Leder provides readers with cosmic perspectives on their everyday world, as in a notably fine piece on footprints in mud, in which he suggests that "everything is footprints. Not just the mark in the mud, but the mud itself: It's a memory of all the ground-up rock, the pulverized leaves, the falling rain, now congealed together ... The present is but the past preserved."

Finally, Leder affirms humanity's connectedness with all of creation in a lovely meditation on the stars, in which he observes that "The stars, so distant, so other-worldly in their shining, are the authors of our solid flesh ... From dust we have come, and unto dust we shall return - yes, but it is stardust."

Leder concludes Sparks of the Divine with a series of "Tips for Spark-Hunters," in which he offers readers guidance and encouragement. This closure is, however, merely a brief summary of what he has argued persuasively throughout the book: By the simple expedient of mindful attention to the everyday world, people can rediscover the depthless mystery that is the context of their lives and thereby reinvest their world with wonder. Socrates claimed that wonder is the beginning of wisdom, and Leder's book is therefore decidedly wise in calling attention to a wonder-filled world.

Robert Neralich has a doctorate in English and teaches Asian studies at Fayetteville High School. Write to him c/o Northwest Religion Editor, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, P.O. Box 5105, Springdale, Ark. 72765, or e-mail: rneralich@aol.com

Spiritual struggle.(The Dance of 17 Lives: the Incredible True Story of Tibet's 17th Karpama) by Mick Brown, reviewed by Isabel Hilton

2007-09-05T03:18:00.000-07:00

Spiritual struggle.(The Dance of 17 Lives: the Incredible True Story of Tibet's 17th Karpama)(Book Review)
Hilton, Isabel
1205 words
17 May 2004
New Statesman
53
ISSN: 1364-7431; Volume 133; Issue 4688
English
Copyright 2004 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved.

The Dance of 17 Lives: the incredible true story of Tibet's 17th Karmapa

Mick Brown

Bloomsbury, 304pp, [pounds sterling]16.99

When the 16th incarnation of the Karmapa was dying at a hospital in Illinois in 1981, his doctor observed that his compassion for those around him seemed to burn even brighter. It was, the doctor recalled, as though he had come to hospital just to cheer everybody up. Devotees, who can be expected to experience intense emotion near their guru, often say such things, doctors less often. Whatever qualities the 16th Karmapa possessed, they clearly touched a wider circle than those already faithful.

There are many such anecdotes in Mick Brown's lively and judicious account of the Karmapas, a story that begins in 12th-century Tibet and reaches its climax in modern India with a violent dispute over the succession to the 16th Karmapa. In between, the narrative roams across territory as wide as the reach of the Karmapas' influence--from Woodstock and Dumfries to Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh.

The battle over the succession that began with the death of the 16th Karmapa still continues. There are two pretenders--one recognised by the Dalai Lama, the Chinese government and most of the Karmapa's followers; the other championed by a dissident lama (the nephew of the previous incarnation) and his retinue of largely foreign activists. The story of the dispute is both a primer in the darker aspects of Tibetan theological politics and a sobering account of what happened when Tibetan Buddhism went west.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The dispute itself is a minefield of conflicting passions and perceptions. A less skilled guide might have trodden on any number of explosives that lie just beneath the surface, but Mick Brown picks his way unscathed through this landscape of good intentions, cynical plots, individual heroism, exotic tradition and esoteric practice, pointing out the path for his readers in good-humoured fashion.

The Karma Kagyu were the first school of Tibetan Buddhism to search for tulkus-reincarnations of great teachers. When a teacher dies, the identification and subsequent education of the tulku is the primary task of his close followers. Both intellectually and spiritually, the transmission of the accumulated knowledge of the lineage depends on the chain remaining intact.

The Karma Kagyu were a powerful school in Tibet, but lost out to the Gelugpa in the 15th century when the 5th Dalai Lama became king. In 1959, the 16th Karmapa fled into exile in India together with the current Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of religious and lay Tibetans. The Dalai Lama settled at Dharamsala, the Karmapa at Rumtek monastery in Sikkim, from where the Karma Kagyu line began a vigorous and successful expansion into the west. By the time of the 16th Karmapa's death, it was the wealthiest and best-established of the schools in exile.

It is the tradition of the Karmapas to leave written instructions on where the next incarnation will appear, but this time the instructions could not be found. Four regents were appointed from among the young lamas closest to the 16th Karmapa, but years went by without a resolution. Then, in 1989, Tai Situ Rinpoche, one of the four, claimed to have discovered the prophecy in a pouch given to him by the Karmapa. A fellow regent, Shamar Rinpoche (Shamarpa), disputed it. In 1992, a third regent, Jamgon Rinpoche, who was due to travel to China to try to locate the new Karmapa, was killed in a car crash.

Ogyen Trinley Dorje, widely recognised today as the 17th Karmapa, was found in China in 1992 and, with the approval of the Chinese government, installed at Tsurphu monastery near Lhasa, the Karmapas' traditional seat. There he stayed until his dramatic escape and arrival in India in January 2001. Shamarpa, however, had never accepted him and in 1994 announced that he had found his own young candidate, Thaye Dorje, whom the Chinese authorities permitted to leave Tibet for India without difficulty. Shamarpa's western followers launched a media war against Tai Situ and his candidate. Supporters of the two lamas slugged it out in the courts, on the streets and on the Internet.

In India, Ogyen Trinley found that he had escaped from one oppression only to be placed under virtual house arrest on the orders of the Indian government, which thought that he and Tai Situ were agents sent from Beijing to stir up trouble. He was unable to visit Rumtek monastery in Sikkim, or to claim the most important insignia of his office, the black hat that was now under armed guard at Rumtek.

The Shamarpa had been in trouble before. In the 18th century, the 10th Shamarpa accompanied his brother, the 6th Panchen Lama, to Beijing, where the Panchen died of smallpox. The emperor made a generous gift of gold coins to the dead man's family. As the funeral cortege wound its way back to Tibet, the Shamarpa quarrelled over the treasure and then fled to Nepal, where he incited the king to send his army to invade Tibet. The Tibetans had to call for the assistance of Chinese imperial troops and the then Dalai Lama, incensed by Shamarpa's behaviour, forbade his reincarnation and buried his crown under the courthouse steps in Lhasa--which, for a Karma Kagyu lama, is about as bad as it can get.

It was nearly 200 years later that the 14th Dalai Lama was prevailed upon to lift the ban and the present incarnation was recognised formally. To his opponents, Shamarpa is as greedy and ambitious in the 21st century as he was in the 18th. Then he turned to Nepal for support; today, he relies largely on foreign devotees, some of whom have taken up his cause with a militancy seldom seen outside Trotskyite cells.

The dispute over the Karmapa's reincarnation might have been just another arcane row. But the Karmapa's escape to India and his growing presence as a charismatic religious leader has given the affair a new dimension. The Dalai Lama is fast approaching 70, and the influence of the next most important Gelugpa lama, the Panchen Lama, is compromised by a dispute with Beijing: the Dalai Lama's candidate has been detained since he was seven; Beijing's candidate is not respected. The Dalai Lama has made a point of embracing the young Karmapa and of trying to overcome the sectarian disputes that divide the main schools of Tibetan Buddhism.

Exiled Tibet needs a figurehead, and it is no longer unthinkable that the 17th Karmapa might play that role, in the absence of the Dalai Lama, or during the minority of the next incarnation. For that possibility to come to fruition, however, it would be better if the dispute were settled. For now, neither candidate has absolute sway--over the followers, the monastery at Rumtek or, most important of all, over the crown woven of dakini hair that is the symbol of the Karmapa's authority.

Isabel Hilton is the author of The Search for the Panchen Lama (Penguin)

Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West By Jeffrey Paine

2007-09-05T03:17:00.000-07:00

Books
AWAKENINGS HOW FORMERLY OBSCURE TIBETAN BUDDHISM BECAME ONE OF THE WEST'S FASTEST-GROWING RELIGIONS
Askold Melnyczuk
994 words
29 February 2004
The Boston Globe
THIRD
D.8
English
© 2004 New York Times Company. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Jeffrey Paine opens his riveting narrative about Tibetan Buddhism's emergence in the West with an account of Thomas Merton's brief but prophetic encounter with "the dharma." In 1968, the last year of his life, America's most celebrated Catholic writer stopped in India on his way to an interfaith conference in Bangkok. The Trappist monk was a serious student of Asian religions, a translator of the Tao Te Ching, and had written extensively about Zen. Yet Merton had dismissed Tibetan Buddhism as a sect riddled with superstition. After a series of unscheduled meetings with several Tibetans, however, Merton, without rejecting his Catholicism, vowed to return to pursue a yearlong retreat as preparation for advanced Buddhist spiritual practices. " `The Tibetan Buddhists are the only ones at present,' " he wrote in "The Asian Journals," " `who have a really large number of people who have attained to extraordinary heights in meditation and contemplation.' "

Long before Merton visited India, Buddhism's signals were picked up by the "antennae of the race": An unusual number of artists and writers, from Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg to Peter Matthiessen and Philip Glass, registered its frequencies. Earlier still, historian Arnold Toynbee had written that the arrival of Buddhism in the West "may well prove to be the most important event of the twentieth century."

The most famous of the Tibetans whose presence so utterly changed Merton's mind was Tenzin Gyatso. As just about everyone knows by now, the 14th Dalai Lama fled the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959. Yet, nearly a decade later, few people outside India were aware of him or of the unfolding tragedy of the Tibetans, whose culture was being systematically destroyed by the communists. Paine points out that in 1968 there were only two Tibetan Buddhist centers outside Asia: in Scotland and Vermont. By 2000, nearly every sizable American city had one, with eight in Washington, D.C., 25 in Boston, and about 40 in New York. One of every 35 French citizens is a Buddhist. Buddhism is the fastest-growing religion in the United States, with the Tibetan variety drawing the most converts.

Paine, formerly editor of the Smithsonian Institution's Wilson Quarterly, offers several reasons for Tibetan Buddhism's many recent successes. First, uprooted from its country of origin, it has been encouraged by circumstances to become ecumenical and universal. Second is its emphasis on individual responsibility, enabling those who succeed at their practice to communicate directly what they have learned. Then there's the heightened mental capability nurtured by meditation. Scientists recently began documenting the physical benefits of prolonged meditative practice. A religion defining itself as "a science of the mind" has made a timely arrival in the empirically oriented West. Finally, and most immediately, the Chinese occupation created a cadre of uniquely qualified teachers who welcomed new students and were willing to travel.

Paine's immensely readable study tells its stories through a series of cameos and profiles of several great Tibetan Buddhist teachers and their disciples. Here we meet the charismatic Lama Yeshe, one of the first Tibetans to take on Western students. His legendary selflessness and inexhaustible exuberance electrified his students. Though he died before the age of 50, the organization he created continues to thrive, with hundreds of centers worldwide.counts a great and dynamic teacher, Trungpa was also an alcoholic whose more outrageous actions confused and hurt some of his disciples. Paine's balanced portrait, chronicling both Trungpa's excesses and his achievements, offers a model of transparency.

Among the accounts of Tibetan Buddhism's Western followers, the story of Alexandra David-Neel stands out. In 1912 she became both the first Western woman to win an interview with the previous Dalai Lama as well as the first Westerner of either sex to receive advanced Tantric teachings directly from a Tibetan. Paine's vivid recital of David-Neel's travels through India, China, and Tibet makes for fascinating reading.

Paine's speculations on the synergies between Buddhism and film might explain its attraction for many Hollywood notables. Emphasizing the deceptive nature of appearances surely appeals to people who slip in and out of identities without attachment. Quoting Alexis de Tocqueville, Paine observes that "American art will no longer attempt to evoke the divine or the ideal but concentrate solely on human realities." A nontheistic practice, Buddhism nevertheless underscores people's capacity to become buddhas, to achieve enlightenment.

And this is where the matter of re-enchantment comes in. Donald Lopez, among other senior American Buddhist scholars, has cautioned against projecting onto this lost Shangri-La one's own longings for mystery. Fortunately, Paine's sensibility is steeped in Western rationalism. He recounts elegantly, yet without fuss, stories of human transformation that consistently incite our capacity for wonder. He relates the change Buddhist practice has wrought on death- row inmate Jarvis Masters, who recognized through it his power to alter the plot of his own story and the history of Diane Perry's metamorphosis from a working-class English girl to a Buddhist nun named Tenzin Palmo, who stayed in solitary retreat for 12 years.

These authoritative sketches reflect Paine's fluency with the essentials of some of Buddhism's thorniest ideas, from emptiness to bodhicitta perhaps the central concept in Tibetan Buddhism, sometimes translated as "loving-kindness." Is it possible to love your enemy, turn the other cheek, put another before you, and embrace death with equanimity? The Dalai Lama's example seems to embody an unequivocal answer to at least three of these questions and remains a primary cause for our enchantment. Whether it's possible to return love for hate and win your country back for your people remains, however, the subject for another volume.

BOOK REVIEW Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West By Jeffrey Paine Norton, 278 pp., $24.95

FOREST RECOLLECTIONS: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-Century Thailand By Kamala Tiyavanich

2007-09-05T03:09:00.000-07:00

BOOK REVIEW - Wandering into history.
981 words
10 January 2004
Bangkok Post
3
English
(c) 2004

Forest monks go from reviled to revered

Chris Baker

FOREST RECOLLECTIONS: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-Century Thailand By Kamala Tiyavanich Silkworm Books, 495 baht

The story of the Northeastern forest monks is one of the most remarkable and illuminating themes in modern Thai history. The personal chronicles of this small handful of men wandering in the forests are fascinating in themselves. But more remarkable still is the way these monks wander through the great changes of modern Thai history - the creation of a centralised state, the growth of modern urban society, the political transition from absolute monarchy to competitive democracy, and the transformation of the landscape from wilderness for agricultural areas.

Most of these religious wanderers were farmers' sons who grew up around the turn of the century when the Northeast was still remote, thickly forested, and closer to Lao traditions than to the culture of Bangkok. Little by little, the Northeast was being drawn into the new centralised administration, and the monkhood was being standardised and centralised under the 1902 Sangha Act.

But these young monks decided to buck the religious establishment. They rejected the book-learning, exam-passing and hierarchy-climbing of the reformed Sangha in favour of learning through meditation and the self-awareness that comes from hardship. They chose to wander in the forests rather than sit in the library. The Sangha repaid their rejection in kind. It derided them as country bumpkins and said their path was not proper Buddhism.

It also made fun of their interest in meditation: "Buddhism would not survive if all monks sat and closed their eyes."

Half a century later, these same forest monks had become pillars of the country. They received the patronage of the royal family, high-ranking officials, and big businessmen. Some were lodged in monasteries specially built for them in the heart of the capital. Their cremation ceremonies were grand and public affairs, while their pictures and amulets became part of urban religious commerce. The unofficial leader of the group (Acharn Man Purithat) was heralded as an arahant, or Buddhist saint.

This transformation was complex.

First, the growth of democratic politics from the 1930s onwards undermined the dominance of the Thammayut order, because the elders now needed the forest monks as allies in the now competitive Sangha politics, and as agents to spread monastic Buddhism in the Northeast.

Second, the Cold War period gave their spirituality a political meaning. They were first evicted from the forests as suspected allies of the communists, then adopted as the focus of a spiritual resurgence to oppose communist values. Around this time, they first attracted the elite patronage that made them famous.

Third, the growth of urban areas brought about changes in Buddhism. In particular, the growing interest in religion among city-dwellers has made meditation popular, and has placed a premium on the special expertise developed by the forest monks. The media has also made prominent monks into celebrities.

Even as they made the slow move from the fringes to the frontlines of popular culture, the base from which they started was being destroyed. The forests in which they wandered were cut down. The tigers and elephants that tested their ability to conquer fear were decimated. The caves where they had meditated became tourist attractions. And the forest village communities where they spent the rainy season retreats were transformed by roads, migration, television and urban influence. In 1987, monks were officially banned from wandering in the forest. Thus they could no longer walk the path that brought them into the limelight to begin with.

The monks' tale is a very big study. Kamala Tiyavanich's book is the third major study in English, and somehow none is able to do justice to the complexity and resonance of the story. Stanley Tambiah (The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets) buried the Northeastern monks under his own grand theory of Buddhist cosmogony. Jim Taylor (Forest Monks and the Nation-State) lost them in a flood of social-science jargon.

Kamala's study has the advantage of being lucidly written, human and passionate. It starts very well. She shows that provincial Buddhism before the 1902 Act was very varied, very local, and very much an active part of these communities. Monks worked, played Songkran, rowed racing boats, acted as community leaders, and preached using folk tales in the local idiom.

Kamala also provides a graphic account of the experience of the forest monks, based on their published biographies. They confront tigers, elephants and snakes; survive jungle fevers; search for caves; test their concentration in charnel grounds; resist the temptations of women.

But when she begins to trace the complex history of the monks' relations with the outside world, her narrative meanders like the tracks of someone lost in the jungle.

In the final two chapters, Kamala argues strongly for the de-bureaucratisation and de-centralisation of the Sangha. She points out that the centralised, bureaucratic, doctrine-focused, hierarchical Buddhism stemming from the 1902 Act is too often seen as "real" or "traditional" Buddhism, while all other practices are portrayed as marginal or heretical. But, she contends, "today's hierarchical and bureaucratic national Sangha is, in terms of the cultural histories of ethnic groups in Siam, an aberration."

She advocates revival of the diversity of local Buddhist practice; more respect for the tradition of self-realisation through experience rather than book-learning; a return to the role of monks as community leaders; more emphasis on meditation; more drama and relevance in Buddhist teaching; and a greater role for women.

The Northeastern forest tradition may be dead, buried by middle-class patronage and destruction of the forests. But Kamala still manages to extract a message for the living from their story: Buddhism has to be removed from the state's clutches and returned to the community.

The quest for nirvana: the Heart of the world by Ian Baker

2007-09-04T02:35:00.000-07:00

The quest for nirvana; The Heart of the World A Journey to the Last Secret Place Ian Baker Penguin: 514 pp., $27.95
Seth Faison
Seth Faison, a former China correspondent for the New York Times, is the author of "South of the Clouds: Exploring the Hidden Realms of China."
1010 words
18 December 2005
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
R-9
English
Copyright 2005 The Los Angeles Times

BROWSING in a Katmandu antique shop one day in 1982, Ian Baker overheard a conversation about a Tibetan sage who had found a hidden paradise between vaulting cliffs in a little-explored corner of Tibet. Baker was curious. He had heard about Tibet's "hidden lands" -- sacred places that Tibetans believe can be found only by a devout pilgrim who can endure both physical and spiritual challenges. An accomplished climber and a determined student of Tibetan culture, Baker resolved to discover one of these places.

He trekked into the mountains outside Katmandu and found the sage, an old man with a long white beard, sitting on a goatskin in a small cabin. Baker asked for guidance on how to conduct his quest, and the sage told him about a cave where he should first go and meditate alone for a month. Baker complied, even staying an extra week.

Back in Katmandu, Baker studied Tibetan and Western texts about searches for the hidden lands. He zeroed in on a mysterious section of the Tsangpo River that for centuries had tantalized explorers seeking a mythic waterfall. No one had yet been able to find it, and Baker decided to try. Battling rough terrain and political obstacles (Chinese officials often blocked his access), he made repeated journeys over the next 15 years into Tibet, a forbidding land of mountainous desert and daunting Himalayan peaks. Each voyage was an ordeal, yet each brought Baker a little closer to his prized goal, the never-seen waterfall.

In "The Heart of the World," Baker tells the story of his uncompromising pursuit of hidden lands and the spiritual adventures he had along the way. It is a remarkable tale, lyrical and full of the magic of wilderness travel. "The cobalt-blue flash of a monal pheasant lured me down a steep track that soon dissipated into dense forest," he writes. "Garlands of moss swayed sensuously from ancient oaks and broad-leafed rhododendrons."

Tibetan Buddhism is the richly colored tapestry that forms the background of the narrative, and Baker weaves it with firm authority, describing myriad dakinis (female spirits) and bodhisattvas in the Tibetan pantheon. He also delivers detailed historical asides about British and Indian explorers from centuries past who struggled through the same terrain. Attractive photographs, many taken by Baker, appear throughout -- although, oddly, Baker and his publisher have chosen to relegate their captions to the back of the book, as if too many facts might intrude on the telling of a good story.

The trials of travel into the Tsangpo Gorge become frighteningly clear. Baker and various accomplices brave sheer cliffs, hike and camp in violent downpours and venture through jungle so thick that only at day's end do they find that 40 or more leeches have burrowed under their clothing to suck their blood.

Hardly a Garden of Eden. Baker's sage had warned him at the outset that the paradise of secret lands described in ancient Tibetan writings was not all that heavenly; rather, the lands were "paradises for Buddhist practice, with multiple dimensions corresponding to increasingly subtle levels of perception."

In other words, it's all in the mind. And an open mind can be richer than most of us know. Baker works hard to straddle the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of his search. He is aiming for the upper realms of consciousness, yet we can feel his earthly determination to achieve the distinction that comes with discovering a secret place in Tibet -- a feat that exhaustive preparation has put within his reach.

But Baker does not ponder, much less explain, just what it is that drives him, over and over, to take on the near impossible. His writing is both majestic and scholarly, but it lacks a self-reflective depth that might have given his story more humanity. The descriptions of many of his personal encounters -- including one with the gorgeous daughter of the Tibetan sage and another with an Indian woman at a Buddhist retreat with whom he investigates the finer points of Tantric sex -- are poetic but somewhat stilted.

After defying the odds and finding the waterfall, Baker allows one of his sponsors, National Geographic, to announce the discovery in a news release and thereby wins a few fleeting moments of fame. He is soon roundly criticized by fellow wilderness travelers, however, who ridicule the notion that he has "discovered" anything at all in a region populated by Tibetan hunters. Baker attempts to downplay this controversy, musing thoughtfully instead on the pointlessness of geographical discovery. ("It's just another place, isn't it?" a Tibetan monk observes.)

Regardless of his status as Tibetan explorer, Baker has given us a compelling tale of the timeless search for spiritual fulfillment and of finding it in an exotic locale where the limits of topography and human possibility meet. *

Buddhism primer draws escape path from modernity

2007-09-04T02:08:00.000-07:00

BOOK REVIEW Buddhism primer draws escape path from modernity
BY ROBERT NERALICH SPECIAL TO THE DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
756 words
16 April 2005
The Arkansas Democrat Gazette
45
English
Copyright (c) 2005 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.

In his foreword to Robert Thurman's Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within, the 14 th Dalai Lama suggests that, "Buddhahood involves a state of complete awareness that finds blissful expression in a compassion that tirelessly embraces all living beings, manifesting whenever necessary to help them reach their own freedom from suffering."

This statement perfectly captures the essence of this ambitious book, in which Thurman argues persuasively that, with practice, this state is available to everyone, just as Buddha claimed 25 centuries ago that "he discovered and proclaimed that total freedom from suffering" and exquisite, enduring joy "is extremely possible for every sensitive being."

Thurman is certainly a reliable authority in this matter, since he is not only the first American to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk but also holds the first endowed chair in Indo-Tibetan studies in America at Columbia University.

Written in an accessible, eminently readable style, Infinite Life is an informative primer of basic Buddhist principles that will delight and instruct seasoned spiritual practitioners and inquisitive neophytes, as well as a charming spiritual autobiography and a masterful exercise in apologetics.

One of the book's major virtues is that it eschews any sort of religious exclusivism, and, in fact, Thurman assures readers that it can be read "while remaining loyal to your religion, allowing the description simply to broaden your imagination."

Early in the book he states this conviction even more forcefully: "In my case, I enthusiastically chime in with the Dalai Lama's call for the leaders of all world religions to abandon once and for all their campaigns to convert everybody."

Thurman begins with a brief critique of what he regards as the two major impediments to human joy in the modern world, either of which can produce what he calls "the terminal life of bondage": nihilistic materialism, which sees the world as soulless, dead and mechanical, and spiritualistic absolutism, which is a form of idolatry that "occurs when human egotism and selfishness restrict the Divine to merely personal or tribal or national possessions."

The principal goal of Infinite Life is to lead people out of these spiritual cul-de-sacs and help them experience the core truths of the human condition: selflessness, interconnectedness to others and infinite life.

For Thurman, the means to realizing these truths resides in the transcendent virtues, to each of which he devotes a chapter: wisdom, generosity, justice, patience, creativity and contemplation. These virtues are transcendent, Thurman suggests, "because they are indivisible from the understanding of the true, selfless nature of reality that is wisdom."

For example, in Thurman's view, generosity "keeps you open through deeds, making you aware of other's needs," while justice "encourages you to make your relationships with others as fruitfully harmonious as they can be."

Further, patience "armors you against any negativity that might be caused by others purposefully or inadvertently inflicting injuries on you," contemplation "provides the central strength that empowers you to achieve a new level of focus and serenity" and, finally, creativity "empowers you with limitless, joyful energy that frees you from the bonds of self-loathing and despair."

However, it is not enough for people simply to understand these virtues; they must engage them until they transform their consciousness. Therefore, each chapter includes spiritual practices that, taken together, constitute a graduated path to enlightened action in the world.

In the book's final chapter, "The Art of Infinite Living," Thurman urges readers to embrace their inherent greatness, undertake a serious spiritual practice and thereby act in ways that benefit all sentient beings. In truth, Infinite Life is a passionate challenge to readers to become spiritual heroes, "who do not make use of dogmatic assertions" but who instead employ their wisdom to help everyone "move beyond faith to direct knowledge and full experience of our true state."

Near the close of Infinite Life, Robert Thurman tells his readers that "this book opens a door for you," and since they have nothing to lose and so much to gain by accepting his invitation to enter, it would be nothing less than a foolhardy act of spiritual cowardice to decline.

Robert Neralich has a doctorate in English and teaches Asian studies at Fayetteville High School. Write to him c/o Northwest Religion Editor, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 515 Enterprise Drive, Suite 106, Lowell, Ark. 72745; or e-mail: rneralich@aol.com

A spiritual journey in the footsteps of the Buddha by Mishra, reviewed by Michael Mcgirr

2007-09-04T02:05:00.000-07:00

A spiritual journey in the footsteps of the Buddha
MICHAEL MCGIRR, REVIEWER
1059 words
5 March 2005
The Age
First
3
English
© 2005 Copyright John Fairfax Holdings Limited. www.theage.com.au Not available for re-distribution.

RELIGION

BOOK REVIEW: AN END TO SUFFERING: THE BUDDHA IN THE WORLD, By Pankaj Mishra, Picador, $30

TO THE naked eye, there appears to be more religion in Australia now than ever before. You only have to think back to the federal election campaign to be reminded of this. Never before had a prime minister been filmed going to church on the day after an election victory, presumably giving thanks to the Almighty for the deliverance of Australia from high interest rates. The subtext of the entire campaign was that God hates high interest rates. God wants us to be comfortable.

There was a moment of breathtaking hypocrisy soon after the campaign when a senior cabinet minister, Tony Abbott, raised his concern about the prevalence of abortion in Australia, a concern I share. But having just won a campaign in part by playing on people's anxieties that they might miss out on the good things, it defied belief that Abbott would then criticise people for making a priority of their personal prosperity and choosing not to have children.

It is curious that an increase in religiosity coincides in Australia with a period of unparalleled prosperity for many. Normally, it is the other way around. Bruce Ruxton, the former head of the Victorian RSL, once told me that church parade was well attended by troops on their way into battle. It was not usually so popular on the way home. In other words, people think of God like an ageing relative they haven't been in touch with for ages when they think the old bloke might be able to help them.

In years to come, wiser heads than mine will ponder the current phenomenon of sharpening religious attitudes in Australia. In doing so, I am sure they will need to grapple with the relationship between Christianity and global politics. They will also need to consider something known as the "Gospel of prosperity". This is a form of Christianity that sees wealth and success as a sign of God's blessing. It takes a few pieces of scripture and uses them to develop an argument that runs directly counter to the whole purpose of the Bible. It turns a communitarian religion into a licence for individuality.

This is the context in which an Australian reader might encounter Pankaj Mishra's philosophical epic, An End to Suffering. It is a book that sheds light, sometimes soft and sometimes harsh, into many hidden corners of human experience, not least the human proclivity to seek material prosperity and, at the same time, to seek liberation from it. We are a confused species and, as time goes by, it seems that confusion more than choice is our hallmark.

Material prosperity is among the forms of suffering to which Pankaj Mishra brings insight gained from his acquaintance with a broad band of thinkers. If this book had an index, it would be a long one. But an index encourages a reader to approach a book like a supermarket and, in this case, that wouldn't be such a good idea.

This book rewards patience. In that regard, it is not unlike its subject, Buddhism, a way of life and thought that is often bowdlerised as a few low-impact cliches. Indeed, you could reduce Christianity to a few well-rubbed sentiments but, if you did, it would no longer be Christianity. It is in the nature of Christianity that it seeks to express itself in new and unfamiliar ways. If Christianity loves jokes, then Buddhism loves riddles. Buddhism maintains its strangeness by its rich sense of irony and humour: even the most profound insight loses something in the very act of finding expression. It is a good foil for Mishra's restless, over-burdened and often anxious spirit. At times he is like an alcoholic trying to describe the beauty of a single glass of wine.

An End to Suffering is an engaging book because, in trying to write a personal history of Buddhism and its relationship to the cultures of the world, Mishra has set himself an impossible task. Yet to have succeeded would have been a most un-Buddhist outcome. He forms judgements slowly. In describing the spiritual paths of two close friends, Vinod and Helen, he shows some of the challenges posed by living in a material world without needing to reach answers. The same is true of his own disjointed journey that never seems to reach a resting place. Mishra is no Buddha and his book is better for it.

At one level, An End to Suffering belongs to that beguiling type of biography, the one written about a figure of whom little is known. Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, was born about 2500 years ago in the Nepalese town of Lambini, a place that Mishra finds now bears little evidence of this distinction. Buddha's moment in history coincided with the development of urban communities, a form of egalitarian living, different from castes, that allowed reflection on the idea of humanity in general, something shared by all people regardless of status.

As the story goes, Buddha left his wife and young family and found enlightenment under a pipal tree. This is often the image that is used to portray Buddhism as a form of disengagement or escape. But Mishra's sturdy explorations of Buddhism in countless contexts return again and again to its ethical demands. In treating the worship of individuality and the tyranny of the ego with a wry smile, Buddhism has offered as radical a view of human depravity as any other. Mishra points out that, in history, different forms of Buddhism have never come to blows in the way that Catholic and Protestant Christians or Sunni and Shiite Muslims have.

Of course, one wonders what Jesus and the Buddha might have said to each other had they ever met. Perhaps this is the wrong question. They probably would have found no reason to speak. They would have shown each other their wounds, perhaps, and shared their compassion for those colourless beings with no wounds to show.

The Buddha and the traveller by Pankaj Mishra

2007-09-04T02:03:00.000-07:00

The Buddha and the traveller
SUN SHUYUN
878 words
19 February 2005
The Globe and Mail
D10
English
All material copyright Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. or its licensors. All rights reserved.

An End to Suffering:

The Buddha in the World

By Pankaj Mishra

Farrar, Straus & Giroux,

422 pages, $37.50

Pankaj Mishra's well-received 2000 novel, The Romantics, tells of students in Benares, India, afflicted with uncertainties about life, society, revolution and love. From the evidence of his new book, The Buddha in the World, it was clearly autobiographical — and now he is searching again, this time as a more mature man, though still at odds with almost all the worlds he lives in.

The exception is Mashobra, a Himalayan village where he rents a cottage from Mr. Sharma. It has everything he needs, not least a beautiful view of the mountains. He installs himself there to turn himself into a writer, and it is the place he thinks of while he is away, and where he returns to write and to find sustenance.

The search this time is on a broader scale, no less than an enquiry into Buddhism and its relevance to contemporary life. The reader will find here a clear account of the development of Buddhism and many of its variants and sects, first and foremost through the life of the Buddha himself. The book takes you through early Indian history, so that you can understand the kind of world in which the Buddha lived and found his way, or rather his “way.”

The Buddha began as an aristocrat, but abandoned his comfortable life, and his wife and child, to look for his truth. It was a largely Brahmin world, and he first went through the ancient forms of meditation and asceticism, but found them wanting. Finally, he won through to his own understanding, principally by an intense analysis of the mind and what constitutes the self. It is living as a determinate being with a strong sense of the permanence of the ego and all its desires that leads to suffering; only jettisoning attachments to the self and its normal worldly objectives can bring release.

That is the heart of Buddhism, but it is not enough on its own; a whole series of imperatives about behaviour and morality complete the account of what is needed to live freely and well. You cannot change the world and everything in it that causes pain — not least disease, aging and death — but you can alter your mind and how you come to terms with life. There is no need to rely on anyone or anything else, not even the Buddha. All you need is in you, you just have to find it.

The book does not quite do what the jacket promises, setting the Buddha's teachings in the context of the author's “restless journeys” in South Asia and abroad. There is all too little of the journeys, and rather a lot of enquiries based on literature and philosophy. The main feature of the book is exegesis. But it does raise intriguing questions, especially about the extent to which modern conflicts, whether the wars and genocides of the 20th century or the terrorism of the 21st, arise from individualism. Are they not all based on strongly held beliefs and ideologies? Could Buddhism be the answer, rather than the “moral certainty with which [people] spoke of the necessity of violence for remaking the world”?

Mishra does not offer any naive reply. While toward the end of his search he has given up much of his skepticism about the Buddha's metaphysical ideas and practical advice, he still asks whether Buddhism can “assuage the political impotence felt by many people today.” (Perhaps he could have addressed that question a little more fully if he had given more space to Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar and his “neo-Buddhist” followers, who at least wrest some dignity from their otherwise appalling lives as untouchables in India.)

Some of the best passages in the book are about Gandhi, who obviously found a great deal in Buddhist teaching, and who inspired Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. It also goes into Nietzsche — whose interest in Buddhism will come as a surprise to many readers — in some depth. And there are numerous intriguing sidelights, such as the vogue for Buddhism in the United States, where for all the meditation centres and effective social action, there is also a very American competition among Buddhist sects, not to speak of thoroughly commercial sales of Buddhist accessories accompanied by a whiff of holiness.

In the end, though, Mishra has not completed his search. Rather than telling you, he leaves you to ask yourself how far Buddhism can help in the modern world. In the final chapter, he returns one more time to Mashobra, no longer quite so paradisiacal. Development has come to the village. “Real estate speculators with alleged Middle East connections had built condominiums, offered them at very high prices, and sold them to suspiciously rich army officers.” Mr. Sharma has aged. The author watches the 9/11 collapse of the Twin Towers on a little black-and-white television in a farmer's hut on Mr. Sharma's estate.

Nothing lasts. As the Buddha said.

Sun Shuyun is a filmmaker based in London, England, and the author of Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud.

The Buddha antidote: an end to suffering by Jeffrey Paine

2007-09-04T01:55:00.000-07:00

The Buddha antidote; An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, Pankaj Mishra, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 422 pp., $25
Jeffrey Paine
Jeffery Paine is the author of, most recently, "Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West" and the editor of "Adventures With the Buddha: A Buddhism Reader."
1076 words
9 January 2005
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
R-5
English
Copyright 2005 The Los Angeles Times

Pankaj MISHRA would seem the last person in the world to be interested in Buddhism. As this book begins, he is a young man heading for an isolated cottage to write, his head full of ambition, dreaming of literary fame to come. The difference between Mishra and other such young people on the literary make -- though he is too tasteful to say so -- is that by now he has made it. His novel "The Romantics" won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for first fiction. His articles in the New York Review of Books, particularly on Kashmir, have gained notice for combining a sociological perspective with a firsthand knowledge of the region. With the prizes falling into his hands like ripe plums, why is he fascinated by a guru from 2,500 years ago who claimed that life is suffering?

That question, Mishra's uncertain relationship to Buddhism, haunts every page of "An End to Suffering." Westerners often have a hard time with Buddhism because it is an alien religion. For Mishra growing up in India, Buddhism seemed, on the contrary, strictly a Western import. He had no curiosity about it until he saw Americans and Europeans coming to India specifically to study it. Mishra's interest deepened when he visited America and observed Buddhist practitioners devoting themselves to socially conscious labors. Still, he wondered, what was he to Buddhism or Buddhism to him?

His answer is "An End to Suffering," which is less a book with a particular subject matter than the author's hit-or-miss attempt to find one. In an old bookshop, Mishra stumbles on an obscure volume by a 19th century traveler in India, and for pages he raves about his wonderful discovery -- without, however, showing us its connection to Buddhism. "An End to Suffering" is filled with a thousand such things: seemingly every book Mishra has read, every scrap of history he knows, and fragments of autobiography (such as his conversations with his landlord and his experiences in moving to London), a large portion of which bypass Buddhism entirely. Hasty readers may wonder what the book is even supposed to be about. Some will doubtless devise their own end to suffering by impatiently tossing this apparently aimless, self-indulgent volume to the floor.

Impatient readers will, however, miss out on a lot, because "An End to Suffering" is three books disguised as one. One book is simply Mishra's retelling of the life story of the Buddha. Although there is nothing particularly original here -- how could there be, after 2,500 years? -- Mishra's version is succinct, lucid and coherent. In readability it surpasses both Karen Armstrong's academic "Buddha" (2001) and Thich Nhat Hanh's poetic "Old Path White Clouds" (1991). By comparing the Buddha to such comparatively modern writers as David Hume, Nietzsche, Proust and even Tocqueville, Mishra makes him into "a true contemporary."

Book Two: More than other studies of Buddhism, "An End to Suffering" resembles David Denby's "Great Books" or Phyllis Rose's "The Year of Reading Proust," in which the authors report on their reading. Mishra's extended book report holds interest because he has read all the classics from an unusual angle. He unexpectedly finds in 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes' description of society as "a war of all against all" a relevant guide to the violence and chaos in India. Mishra's sentimental landlord might wax poetic about India's glorious spiritual legacies, but Mishra, like V.S. Naipaul, sees in India's religious past the source of its present stagnation. His own gurus are the cultural magnificoes of the West -- Emerson, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx -- who he hopes will be like rungs on a ladder that will lift him out of the morass.

Book Three: "An End to Suffering" comes close to being Mishra's intellectual autobiography (its subtitle might more accurately read "Pankaj Mishra in the World"). It is the story of someone who journeyed from outside of history to its center. Mishra's father grew up in a remote, time-forgotten village, never seeing a Westerner, unable to imagine the larger India the newspapers told of. When Mishra later read Marx's description of people who shake free from fatalism and "show what man's activity can bring about," he recognized a description of himself.

By dint of his achievements, Mishra has moved to the center of the contemporary world, living part of the year in London and New York and writing for the most prestigious publications. Yet in the very Europe and America he had once admired from afar, Mishra was astonished to discover, in a more deluxe version, the same economic disparity, racial and religious hatred and violence he thought was the particular malaise of India.

Mishra suggests that Buddhism might offer an antidote for the world's malaise. His lately-arrived-at appreciation of Buddhism was gained not from reading dharma sutras or studying with Tibetan lamas but through two of the most unlikely guides imaginable. From Nietzsche, Mishra learned the value that Buddhism might offer the individual, and indirectly from Tocqueville the value it might offer society. In the 19th century, Nietzsche praised Buddhism as "a hundred times more realistic than Christianity," because it opposed not sin but suffering and because it valued examination and experience over theological dogma. In "Democracy in America," Tocqueville argued that to escape destruction, America required a spiritual counterweight to offset its rampant individualism and materialism. Mishra observes that "Buddhism in modern America often seemed to have ... the same role Tocqueville thought religion had once played in early American civil society.

"An End to Suffering" takes the long and seemingly inconclusive route around its subject matter because, finally, it is trying out a different approach to it. Those who have taken an interest in Buddhism have either become enthusiastic practitioners, or rejected it or studied it academically. But Mishra argues that one need not adopt any of these alternatives: You can simply do as Mishra does and appreciate the Buddha and his teachings intellectually, historically and socially. *

"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac turns 50 - revisted by Alfred Lubrano

2007-09-04T01:26:00.000-07:00

'On the Road' again: Readers head down Jack Kerouac's trail as the book turns 50
By ALFRED LUBRANO
The Philadelphia Inquirer
1030 words
2 September 2007
The Bradenton Herald
est
2
English
(c) Copyright 2007, The Bradenton Herald. All Rights Reserved.

F rom its start, America was a westward-leaning country. The notion that a person could always head west to pursue his dreams, find himself or start over is a basic tenet of American myth and tradition.

For Jack Kerouac, the idea of staying in motion on a westward trajectory was vital to his survival as a person and a writer.

The novel that described his urgent, high-energy journeys, "On the Road," was published 50 years ago Sept. 5.

The anniversary is prompting appreciations - and reinvigorating old criticisms - of a book many say defined the 1950s Beat generation and served as a template for hipster iconoclasts of every stripe who rejected the 9-to-5 status quo in favor of go-man-go sensation (the now-cliched sex-drugs-rock-and-roll troika), endless curiosity, and indulgent self-exploration.

" 'On the Road' is a major novel," wrote Gilbert Millstein in a New York Times review that appeared on Sept. 5, 1957. There are sections of writing "of a beauty almost breathtaking," Millstein continued. It is, he wrote, "the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat.' . . ."

Since that review, academics, critics and others have argued endlessly about the book's place in the American canon, and in the culture.

Decried as too narrow, naive and adolescent to be considered the Great American Novel, "On the Road" nevertheless reverberates for readers of several generations for its jazzy, hopped-up writing and its messages of lighting out for the territory, and striving to live a bright-burning life.

"The only people for me are the mad ones," Kerouac writes in a celebrated line from the book, "the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. . . ."

When it appeared 50 years ago, the book made some noise.

"It was this huge slash in the consciousness," said Anne Waldman, a poetry professor and co-founder with Kerouac contemporary Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo.

"On the Road" entered the culture in the time of the company man, the highly structured, conformist, low-wattage Eisenhower years, Waldman said.

"Here was an energetic book, breaking with writing form," she added, "written in a highly fluid style, by a curious seeker, a troubled figure with an innate music in his head - the sounds, the rhythms, the syllables."

Kerouac was an honest, soulful presence at the core of the book, Waldman said. He explored the theme of buddy love, with a homoerotic tinge. He wrote about jazz, drugs and promiscuous sex. Here was a protagonist more interested in getting loaded than getting rich, more concerned with Buddhism and expanding consciousness than acquiring a house in the suburbs.

"He certainly was an interesting mongrel," Waldman concluded.

Kerouac came from a working-class French-Canadian family in Lowell, Mass., and got an athletic scholarship to Columbia University. There he met Ginsberg and formed the core of the Beats, the non-yawners whose incandescence lit up the skies.

Kerouac famously wrote "On the Road" in a caffeine-jangled 20 days in April 1951 on a 120-foot scroll of art paper he had taped together. (Kerouac said he was on Benzedrine as well, but friends refuted that as the hyperbole of an author out to burnish his wild-man image.)

The speed and virtuosity reminded Kerouac, biographers say, of jazz riffing.

In truth, Kerouac had been working on the novel for years, and the three-week blurt was really the culmination of years of careful crafting.

At the center of the novel is Dean Moriarty, a pseudonym for Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady, a "holy con-man" who was an intellectual, a criminal, and a shining inspiration for Kerouac (Sal Paradise in the book).

Together they travel America and Mexico, spending time talking about jazz and God, smoking dope, and engaging prostitutes.

Through the years, young readers especially have been enthralled by the kinetic restlessness, the life-on-the-run thrill. They read the book as the adventures of a disaffected James Dean type let loose on the countryside.

But that's only part of the story, said Hilary Holladay, an English professor and director of the Kerouac Center for American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. The school is doing an anniversary celebration of the book, including a public reading Sept. 5.

"Kerouac was this deep, lonely, melancholy man," Holladay said. "And if you read the book closely, you see that sense of loss and sorrow swelling on every page."

Ultimately, Holladay said, "there may be a gulf between what Kerouac was doing and what we want to think he was doing. This is a strange book."

Holladay has taught the book for 13 years. In the past, students viewed "On the Road" as a traveler's guide to enlightenment. They were excited.

These days, though, kids don't react the same way. "They're more detached from the book and its message than students before," Holladay said. They are not gripped by the romantic notions that fevered Kerouac's brain.

Kerouac drank himself to death, suffering a fatal internal hemorrhage in St. Petersburg in October 1969. He was 47, his last few years a blur of bar fights and bad reviews. But his passing was news enough to be reported by CBS-TV anchor Walter Cronkite and for a crowded memorial back in Lowell.

That 100,000 copies of "On the Road" are purchased every year speaks to a certain timelessness, despite the book's flaws.

Most likely, it's the connection to the irresistible idea of moving on and getting gone, into "the rainy night of America and the raw road night."

Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness, and the Man Who Found Them All By Perry Garfinkel

2007-08-31T22:52:00.000-07:00

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

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse - reincarnated and reviewed by David L. Ulin

2007-08-31T22:49:00.000-07:00

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.

The last how-to; The Tibetan Book of the Dead Translated by Gyurme Dorje

2007-08-31T22:48:00.000-07:00

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.

A look at the bright side; Happiness: A History by Darrin McMahon

2007-08-31T22:45:00.000-07:00

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."

The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha By Stephen T. Asma HarperSanFrancisco

2007-08-31T22:44:00.000-07:00

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.

Buddha (comics) Vol.1-8 by Osamu Tezuka

2007-08-31T22:41:00.000-07:00

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.

Why we want what we want by William B. Irvine

2007-08-31T22:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Bayon: New Perspectives by Joyce Clark (ed.)

2007-08-31T22:31:00.000-07:00

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?

LIVING WITH THE DEVIL: A Meditation on Good and Evil By Stephen Batchelor

2007-08-31T22:28:00.000-07:00

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

Temple of unreason; Tibetan Book of the Dead

2007-08-31T22:27:00.000-07:00

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.

Pictures, words, understandings by Buddhadasa Bhikku

2007-08-31T22:23:00.000-07:00

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.

A Buddhist icon's wisdom collected by Ellis Widner

2007-08-31T22:16:00.000-07:00

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.