Persist Readings and Events

April, 2010

* Tuesday, April 16th, 7:00 PM, Linda Kunick O Salon, 1147 Coldwater Canyon Drive, Beverly Hills, 90210 (more info)

* Wednesday, April 17th, 4:00 PM, Santa Monica Art Studios, 3026 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica, 90401 (more info)

* Tuesday, April 20th, 5:00 PM, Broida 1610, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93101 (more info)

* Wednesday, April 21st, 7PM, Contemporary Arts Forum, 653 Paseo Nuevo, Upper Arts Terrace, Santa Barbara, 93101 (more info)

*Tuesday, April 27th, 7 PM, Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 West Malvern Avenue, Fullerton, 92833

Bill Maher: Buddhism is a Crock and Outdated.

The Worst Horse as usual is on its game in reporting another example of just how foreign Buddhism still is to many in the West. Bill Maher, the American comedian and t.v. show host (who I usually find hilarious) recently said some pretty uninformed things about Buddhism. His comments are in red and mine in yellow:

Maher: [Buddhism] really is outdated in some ways — the “Life sucks, and then you die” philosophy was useful when Buddha came up with it around 500 B.C., because back then life pretty much sucked, and then you died – but now we have medicine., and plenty of food

(James::Not all of us Bill, a lot of people in this world don't know where their next meal will come from. And medicine? Americans can't even afford medicine these days let alone impoverished countries. Go to Africa where I lived for two years and tell me there's enough food and medicine for everyone. Then tell me that thus there isn't much suffering from it.),

Maher: and iPhones, and James Cameron movies – our life isn’t all about suffering anymore.

(James: And life wasn't all about suffering back in Buddha's time either)

Maher: And when we do suffer, instead of accepting it we try to alleviate it,

(James::Buddhists seek to alleviate suffering too but we also have had the revelation that no amount of "relieving" can end the suffering. What Buddhists are more interested in other than alleviating suffering is to END suffering once and for all through, what I would consider to be the first "12 Steps" program that is the Eight-Fold Path). If Buddha saw life as hopeless as Maher believes he taught then why would he have even tried to develop a system to deliver himself from it?

Maher: Tiger said, “Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves” makes us unhappy, which confirms something I’ve long suspected about Eastern religions: they’re a crock, too. Craving for things outside ourselves is what makes life life

(James: And despite its highlights, life is full of a lot of suffering Bill. There isn't enough money--even for a lot of millionaires who won't be "satisfied" until they get a BILLION dollars. Even those that spend their money can never buy enough houses, clothes, boats, vacations to feel satisfied for long. We lust after something until we get it and then quickly become bored with it and we return again to enslaving ourselves to crave once more. Buddha didn't say that we couldn't enjoy life but that we should enjoy life in moderation to reduce our suffering, and he laid out a path that many people have followed over the millennia toward lasting peace of mind and happiness.

And Buddha didn't command any of this, which is what I think separates Buddhism from many of the traditionally defined, "religions." Buddha encouraged seeing for oneself if his techniques do indeed bring about a greater peace and a life of less suffering by direct experience, which isn't unlike the scientific method where direct observations are the basis of knowledge. Pursue a life of constant seeking for the next "buzz of pleasure" and then live life for at time following the Buddha's guidelines and see, which way gives you the strongest feeling of satisfaction and happiness of life. If you find you think Buddhism is only causing you more problems then best of luck. Sincerely. A lot of people come and go with Buddhism. Buddhism doesn't want to force anyone to do anything. Buddhism would rather let the people come to it so that they are making a choice of their own free will and feel ready to follow such a path).

Maher: — I don’t want to learn to not want, that’s what people in prison have to do

(James: We're in a prison, now, Bill--look around you--We Want a better job, want a new car, want our body to heal quicker or look sexier, want our spouse to change to how we think they should be, and on and on. It's a prison without bars that lures us with shiny new distractions to keep us from finding a way out of the suffering. However, it doesn't have to be an either or proposition as you're stating. You're saying Buddhism says "life sucks, it has no meaning, purpose or value" but that is a common misconception. That isn't Buddhism--that's nihilism. Buddhism teaches that there is a way to live in balance with things of the world yet reduce your long-term suffering. That is what Buddhism offers).

Maher: And reincarnation? Really? If that were real, wouldn’t there be some proof by now? A raccoon spelling out in acorns, “My name is Herb Zoller and I’m an accountant.” …something?

(James: First of all not all Buddhists believe in reincarnation. A lot of Buddhists believe in rebirth and yet still others believe in neither. As for proof? Even science says that energy never disappears but simply changes form. There are many Buddhists who say that it doesn't really matter much what happens after death (if anything) because the only moment we have is this one. For these Buddhists they focus on the rebirth that happens within this lifetime. For example, I am a completely different person from who I was 10-12 years ago when I was an ardent Mormon who was politically conservative. Now I am a Liberal Buddhist!!

But the point of rebirth, in my view, isn't so much about whether we are reborn a slug, or even reborn at all but rather that we realize how our actions affect our future. It's about becoming aware of how we alone are the architects of our own life and what our life becomes is directly influenced by our actions. So, for me, it comes down to what you reap is what you sow. And if all you water are seeds of hatred, greed and delusion then you will reap a lot of misery but if you water seeds of love, compassion and patience then you will reap the opposite and leave a better world behind then when you were born into it.

Maher: People are always debating, is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy: it’s a religion. You’re a religion if you do something as weird as when the Buddhist monks scrutinize two-year-olds to find the reincarnation of the dude who just died, and then choose one of the toddlers as the sacred Lama: “His poop is royal!” Sorry, but thinking you can look at a babbling, barely-housebroken, uneducated being and say, “That’s our leader” doesn’t make you enlightened. It makes you a Sarah Palin supporter.

(James: Bill, I like you--I really do, and while I think your usually well informed, on Buddhism you're quite ignorant. Only one school of Buddhism believes that their teachers are reincarnated, and that's Tibetan Buddhism. If you have a problem with Tibetan Buddhism then take that up with the Dalai Lama, but I would have expected you to know better than to lump all Buddhists together. I didn't want to write this to defend Buddhism so much as to explain it, as best as a common practitioner like myself can to those who aren't familiar with Buddhism so they, can hear both sides).

~Peace to all beings~

Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 2/28/2010

Love is the capacity to take care, to protect, to nourish. If you are not capable of generating that kind of energy toward yourself- if you are not capable of taking care of yourself, of nourishing yourself, of protecting yourself- it is very difficult to take care of another person. In the Buddhist teaching, it's clear that to love oneself is the foundation of the love of other people. Love is a practice. Love is truly a practice.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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Also on Friday...

... we went to hear Mary Oliver read at UCLA's Royce Hall. Talk about rock star! This poet, now in her seventh decade like myself, managed to pretty much fill the entire hall--I'm not sure how many seats, but a big auditorium. She read with charm, with self-deprecating humor, with modesty, and her poems she picked were delightful, ranging from the well-known--"The Journey," and "Flare"--to sweet, short tributes to her dog, Percy. A keen observer of the natural world, she writes about it with obvious passion. For me, what her poems lack is a kind of bite, a complexity that leaves me engaged in what she has to say, perhaps a bit mystified, challenged to come back and read again to be sure I didn't miss some important part of them. It felt a bit like dessert to me, with the soup and the main course lacking. I love nature, too. I want to learn more than I already know, to see something I have not already seen. Perhaps, you readers of poetry out there, perhaps you disagree.

Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 2/27/2010

So if we love someone, we should train in being able to listen. By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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China's Frozen Desert

China's Frozen Desert
As commerce flourished along the Silk Road, Central Asia became a melting pot of cultures. Here on the edges of the Taklmakan Desert, an exotic blend of Indian, Mongol, Chinese, and European influences fueled an astonishing cultural Renaissance. In the 7th century, a Chinese monk, Xuanzang, plunged into the desert while on a Buddhist pilgrimage to India. His descriptions of the oasis-cities he encountered would prove invaluable to another explorer, more than a thousand years later. 20th century archeologist Sir Aurel Stein took on the deadly Taklamakan to prove his own theories about Western China's lost civilization. Again and again Xuanzang's writings led him to archeological treasure - once thriving cities now buried in the sand. On their monk's trail, Stein made his greatest discovery, a thousand-year-old Buddhist library in near-perfect condition.

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Rachel Whiteread at the Hammer Museum

I was excited to see the Rachel Whiteread exhibition at the Hammer Museum yesterday. I have not been able to actually see a great deal of her large-scale work, because it would take more travel than I can contemplate. Billed as "Drawings," though, this show did include a number of the British artist's three-dimensional works, and it offered a rare opportunity to get better acquainted with an artist I have admired, as it were, from afar.

Whiteread is known for working with molded forms, substituting a specific object--a table, a chair, a mattress...

... a light switch, even an entire house--for the space it contains, or the space that contains it. The result is what I can best describe as a real-ization, a concretization of absence. Like the wind, the object becomes invisible to the eye, or visible only in the traces it leaves in its wake--the shift of leaves in the trees, the movement of blades of grass. In Whiteread's work, the mind is left to re-create, or imagine what was there, which becomes a ghostly incarnation of its previous existence.

This is intensely elegiac work. The affect is one of ineffable sadness, where emptiness is given tangible form that requires us to make the effort to search for what we can no longer see. It's also intensely human: we live, we experience our presence as bodies in the world, we die and, so far as we can tell, we vanish into nothingness. We experience the same with those we love, those close to us. They vanish from our lives, and yet we continue to sense their presence through their very absence. We are confronted, for example, in this exhibition, with an empty antique bathtub, its absence recreated in solid, adjoining blocks of concrete, and feel ouselves in the presence of a stolid, silent sarcophagus, which seems to demand that we imagine its occupant, some long-departed Marat, say, still haunting its vacant space.

No wonder, then, that Whiteread won an international competition to create a Holocaust monument for Vienna, Austria...

... and how appropriate that she should have envisioned a vast library turned inside-out, its myriad volumes turned spine-in, anonymous, standing in for the absent ones who lost first their identities and then their lives to Hitler's madness. The model for this magnificent memorial is on display, along with the detailed drawings that led to its creation.

Also on display, in a "Vitrine," is a multitude of small objects from Whiteread's personal collection--fossils, kitchen molds and utensils, rocks, shoe-trees, boxes and dental molds--each one casting light on the inner workings of her creative mind; and a collection of postcards, mostly of architectural structures, with areas shaded out or punched with holes which leave the eye searching for the lost structures and forms. These, along with the drawings, offer a fascinating study of the way in which this artist's own distinctive vision sees the world, the objects that shape our human lives and the spaces in which we dwell. If the exhibition's dominant tone is sadness, it is a sadness that leaves us more acutely, more profoundly aware--and more mystified by the wisdom of that old Buddhist conundrum from the Heart Sutra: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form." Oh, yes!

Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 2/26/2010

Training is needed in order to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice DEEP LOOKING directed toward the other person you love. Because if you do not understand this person, you cannot love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. That is the message of the Buddha.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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A Day in the Country

Too often we denizens of the big cities, especially those of us involved in what we are pleased to call the "art world," tend to think like Warty Bliggens. Never heard of Warty Bliggens? Find out about him here. Warty is a toad who thinks that he's the center of the universe. You'll remember, perhaps, that I mentioned Pete the Parrot the other day, who palled around with Bill Shakespeare at the Mermaid tavern. Warty is another creation of Don Marquis, who came up with so many wry and truthful observations about human foibles and pretensions.

So yesterday I had a speaking gig at California State University, Channel Islands, out in Camarillo, a good way from our little Los Angeles center of the art world universe. To get there, Ellie and I took a circuitous route through a steady, misty drizzle of insistent rain to Oxnard, another small-ish city near Camarillo, similarly distant from the epicenter. We went there to see an exhibition intriguingly titled Harmony Reverberates Optimism, curated by the artist Ronald Lopez. Arriving at Oxnard College, we found not a big institutional building with a white-walled gallery space but a small cottage where the exhibition was installed in what once had been the living space. It was soon crowded with an enthusiastic gathering of students and others, all engaged with the work of the six socially-engaged women artists included in the show.

This is not a review. Suffice it to say that it was a fascinating show, much bigger in its intellectual and aesthetic reach than the tiny space in which it was assembled. Check out the site and look at some of the images. Iranian-born artist Azadeh Tajpour created an installation in one small room, its floor inches deep in strips of shredded paper with the names and some personal details of each of a mere 4%--by one count, there are many of others--those already killed in the conflict in Iraq. The viewer is invited to wade through the "trash" that is all that remains of these human lives, and contemplate the tragic waste. Kristin Ross Lauterbach & Christina Lee Storm present clips from a longer movie, "Flesh," which documents the trade in human flesh right here in the back streets of Santa Monica. Ofunne Obiamiwe, a Nigerian by birth, offers an interactive, participatory installation called "Status of Women", playing on the new medium of social networking by "realizing" the idea of a Facebook page, inviting a dozen women to contribute profiles--along with an intimate article of their clothing--which are then framed and hung as artworks on the gallery wall.

Lea Redmond seeks to raise consciousness about the clothes we wear, and where they come from--perhaps, too, from what kind of sweat shop. She includes a world map, where she asks viewers to note the origin of the clothes they're wearing, to cut out the label that identifies it and pin it to the map. I was surprised to find that my new jacket came from Bulgaria! And finally SaeRi Cho Dobson shows a series, "Seven Deadly Seams," in which she hangs hand-printed garments on a line, as you might see them swathed in transparent plastic covering at the cleaner's, imprinted with socially-conscious messages about the ethnic economic, and labor issues in the dry-cleaning business. Of this seemingly dry (forgive the pun!) material, she creates a lively and provocative visual display.

Kudos to Ronald Lopez, then, for having been able to assemble a show where social engagement blends successfully with visual interest, from the aesthetic point of view, and sometimes powerful emotion content. That all this happens to be installed in a tiny cottage on a modest campus in a small town away from the hub of art activity makes it, for me, all the more interesting. Warty Bliggens notwithstanding.

From Oxnard College we circled back through that persistent slow drizzle--really more like a heavy Scotch mist--to Camarillo, a town I had only every heard of as the site of what used to be called a "mental institution", the one closed down many years ago by Ronald Reagan's draconian spending cuts. Turns out to my surprise that the 1930s era Mission-style buildings are now the site of the newest California State University campus, CSU Channel Islands. Who knew? Obviously not this Warty Bliggens. I had no idea...

But what a delightful campus. You approach it along a winding road, between vast agricultural fields with rows of healthy-looking vegetables--looking all the fresher for the still-falling mist that drifted, yesterday, late afternoon, in and out among the surrounding hills and woods. A bucolic paradise, it seemed to us, which offered no hint of the presence of a university campus at the end of the road. But when you reach it, the campus is indeed an attractive one, with mostly low buildings, tree-lined avenues, and great, grassy expanses of courtyard. At the center of this essentially traditional California environment...

... we were surprised to drive past a truly spectacular piece of contemporary architecture, later identified for us as the John Spoor Broome Library...

.... designed by the noted British architect Norman Foster. This, in what in Warty Bliggens-speak might be disparagingly called "the middle of nowhere." We live, as they say, and learn.

You think that way out here parking would be a snap. Well, no. Our assigned parking lot was crowded, and we were lucky to find the last remaining space. It's clearly a busy, active campus. In the art department, our destination, we were welcomed warmly by Jack Reilly, Professor and Chair of the department, at whose invitation I had come to give my talk. Jack gave us a tour of the department he has nurtured since the opening of the school, just a handful of years ago, and we found a good number of working studios--painting, ceramics and sculpture, a computer animation lab--where students and faculty were hard at work and obviously productive. (Jack tells us that some of the studios are shortly to be moved, as the department continues to expand to take in more students and, soon, a start-up graduate program.) The measure of success, in an art school, is what's happening on the walls and, these days, on the computer monitors; and CSUCI students are clearly getting some excellent instruction and passionately engaged in what they do. A good feeling, everywhere we went.

Then a quick tour of the library. It's an amazing building, within, designed with the full range of a library's purposes in mind--ample, accessible shelving for books and other materials, wide open, comfortable spaces and numerous small niches for private study. In the contemporary educational culture, electronic media form an important part of a library's services, and these seemed state-of-the-art and, again, freely accessible. There's a small gallery--with a current installation by Barbara Drucker, and a computer animation studio. Above all, the library has a great feel to it: it manages to be spacious and efficient, but also warm and uplifting to the spirits, a pleasure to spend time in. We wished we had more...

My talk, I think, went well--to judge by the reception. I felt I was a little slow in getting warmed up and reaching out to the audience, but once I reached the point where I felt comfortable and hit my stride, the words began to flow in a way that felt good to me. One test of success, for me, is the number and quality of questions that I get once I'm done talking, and here the questions were many, and went deep. And the individual responses, at the end, were genuine and gratifying.

All in all, then, a good day in the country. I woke this morning with Warty Bliggens in my mind--along with a healthy reminder of what we too often forget: that no one is entitled to think of himself, or herself, as the center of the universe; and that our ignorance serves us badly when we think ourselves as such.

Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 2/25/2010

In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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Note:

Gregg Chadwick, at Speed of Life, has a thoughtful review of "Persist" on his blog today.

Headshot: Vanity

It was fascinating--and actually a bit embarrassing--to watch myself, yesterday, as I posed for a series of headshots in connection with my current shameless drive for self-promotion. Well, I like to think that it's the book I'm promoting, not myself, but I have to admit there's a good deal of overlap between the two!

I have been using the headshot you see in the right hand sidebar of The Buddha Diaries for quite some time, though I can't remember precisely when it was taken. Turns out it doesn't have sufficiently "high resolution" for print purposes, and my publisher, Paul Gerhards of When This Is, That Is, had written to request one to accompany an interview/review coming out in a Dallas-Fort Worth are magazine. I have, in fact, been getting a number os such requests, so now seemed the time to make a new one...

With neither time nor inclination for a professional job, I dug out our Canon digital and its accompanying manual to find out how to go about making a high resolution photo. The instructions proved surprisingly easy to find, and I summoned all my technical skills to re-set the camera. It happened to be one of the two afternoons each week when Daniel, my part-time assistant, reports for duty, so I had him take the first series of pictures.

I should confess at this point that I had given some conscious thought as to how I should "look" for this picture. My Buddhist critic looked over my shoulder with bemusement as I picked, first, a red shirt, then looked in the mirror decided that the color was too strong and "faded out" my face. Such vanity! I watched myself thinking, in the mirror, that I should look more like a "writer"--such pretension!--and went back to the closet to select a blue work-shirt, one that I in fact rarely wear. It suited, I decided, both purposes, color and style. For effect, I added the black cardigan that my daughter, Sarah, gave me for Christmas. There. The "look"!

Again, with more self-consciousness than modesty would allow, I picked out two backgrounds which I thought neutral enough to make me shine, and put Daniel to work. I noticed the care with which I strove for the right facial expression, the right smile. It's a long time since I paid such close attention to the muscles that govern the movement of the cheeks and the lips...

The results of Daniel's effort, and mine, were decidedly mixed. They ranged from the slightly goofy...

to the plain idiotic...

... though I have to say I scrapped the worst of them in camera. We searched through a dozen or more photos and came up with this...

as being the pick of the bunch.

Still, my vanity was not satisfied. The backgrounds, I decided after all, were too bland; the expressions not quite right. Too much scrawny neck. Too many creases around the eyes. I did not, I have to say, appear quite as cool and writerly as I had intended, nor indeed quite so handsome. Since Ellie was due back soon from her afternoon errands, I decided to wait, so that she could bring her skills to bear on the problem. Not only is she gifted with an excellent, discerning eye for location, she knows my quirks well, and can be a demanding sartorial critic. I put her to work.

She scouted the house for possible locations, and came up with one in front of a big painting by Jeff Koegel--the artist, coincidentally, who came up with the cover image for "Persist."

The digital camera, I have to say, comes in remarkably handy on such occasions. You can snap off a couple of dozen shots without having to worry about printing the results, and examine the pictures along the way. Ellie proved adept at refining the angles and distances...

... and came up with a number of perfectly acceptable results. Indulge me (as I indulged myself!) if I show you another...

... somewhat more "soulful", do you think? But maybe a bit "blurry." And here's the final choice:

I tell you all this, I promise, in the spirit of good fun and with a wry sense of the vanity involved. It's important, obviously, for promotional purposes, to get it right. That's one thing. It's quite another to watch myself making those self-conscious choices and posing like a peacock to make myself look good. Then again, I look at the wonderful pictures of Than Geoff (Thanissaro Bhikkhu) that accompany his magazine articles, and wonder: did he pose for his pictures, and did he make choices like I did? Or is he just naturally and unselfconsciously photogenic?

Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 2/24/2010

People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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Getting Ready...

... to celebrate. I noted this morning, on checking in with my site meter, that my visitor count stood at that moment at exactly 99,000--with another 150,000 "page views," whatever that means. This means that in a short while The Buddha Diaries will top 100,000--or a quarter of a million visits plus views!

I'm amazed. It seems only a short while since I was celebrating fifty thousand. Since the publication of "Persist," in fact, daily readership of The Buddha Diaries has shown a significant increase, and this clearly has to do with all the promotional efforts I have made to spread word about the book.

It is profoundly gratifying for one who identifies himself as a writer, as I do, to know that there are people out there reading what I write--and often returning regularly for more.

I have a plan, to mark the occasion: since I'm very often able to tell, from Sitemeter, the location of my visitors, in order, by city and country, I plan to be watching for the hundred thousandth and will hope to send that person a commemorative copy of "Persist." It can only work, however, if I identify the location--city, country, time--on the following day's entry, and that person sends me an email with their street address. I have no idea whether this plan will work, but I'm keen to give it a try. It might turn out to be a fascinating puzzle...

Dalai Lama: Tiger Woods? Who's that?

Besides the obvious advice of cultivating self-discipline, I think the best thing about the Dalai Lama's comments in regard to Tiger Woods and Buddhism was that he needed to be told who Tiger Woods was in the first place!! I think the Dalai Lama's ignorance about celebrities and their lives is a good thing--it's a good example to put forth. So many of us are obsessed with celebrities because we find our own lives unsatisfactory, boring or inadequate in one way or another. This obsession is a craving for a different life, one where we are famous, beautiful and/or rich. Anything but our "ordinary selves."

The world of celebrity looks glamorous and ideal but it's a facade for fellow, flawed humans who are just as miserable as anyone else in this sea of samsara. Because when we peel back the layer of glitz, glamour, make-up and good acting skills we see that they live very flawed lives of sex, drug and money addictions amongst many other chains of suffering that bind them. Our obsession is a form of escapism in a desperate but futile search for happiness in the material world. Yet once we return from the movie or finish reading the celebrity magazine we must face our lives again. The waves of reality come washing back in like a tidal wave to inundate and knock us over with the suffering that we tried to ignore.

This is why, like the Dalai Lama, I generally am not very interested in the lives of celebrities. I appreciate their art but I don't see them as examples of how to live a life with less suffering. One of the only "celebrities" that I think does that is the Dalai Lama himself.

~Peace to all beings~

Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 2/23/2010

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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Persist: A New Review

Please take note of this review of "Persist" on Stephen Schettini's excellent blog, The Naked Monk. I hope you will find ways to pass on the link. Best thanks...

Film Review: Departures

Laying Out the Dead: A Performance Art

We do so easily overlook films (and books, and music, and countless other treasures!) that are not hyped to us by the familiar, relentless media promotion. Here's one that barely made it--to me, at least--past the insistent, omnipresent hype for films of much less interest and quality. It's called Departures, directed by Yojiro Takita. The acting is powerfully understated, the settings--both interior and exterior--quite beautiful, and the dialogue, insofar as I was able to determine through the subtitles, sparse but intense.

The story is that of a cellist, Daigo, brought to the realization that he will not survive professionally as a musician, who returns with his loving and dutifully tolerant wife Mika to the small town of his birth and there stumbles, out of financial necessity, into a job preparing the bodies of the dead for cremation. Initially horrified and ashamed of the work, he hides it from Mika. But he himself is soon converted as he observes the rigorous dedication of a wry and dourly affectionate boss to the tender, ritual art of caring for the dead. The bended-knee ceremony takes place on tatami mats in the presence of mourning relatives--some tearfully grief-struck, some angry, some fearful--and involves the discreet disrobing of the corpse, the re-clothing in ceremonial kimono, the making-up of the face and the reverent folding of the hands before removal into the coffin that will then be transported for cremation.

Along the way, we are offered insights into the social niceties involved, the social structure of a small Japanese town, the lovely cleansing ritual of the bath (about which I have written from first hand elsewhere. The differences between Japanese customs and our own are many, and the respect and discipline that form the basis for their social relationships are at once foreign and appealing to the American heart. The formalities create a distance that makes moments of closeness all the more surprising and intense. They remind us that love can be as deeply felt, as authentically expressed in ways other than superficial acts of intimacy. When Mika decides to leave Daigo rather than accept what she first sees as the shame of his new profession, it comes as a profound and poignant shock.

At the heart of the film is Daigo's lasting pain and anger resulting from his abandonment by his father while he was still a young boy. His love of the cello, associated with that pain, is its constant reminder. He finds in his employer and teacher--a man at once emotionally remote yet almost painfully tender--an ideal father who oversees his transition from boyish isolation and sensitivity into life as an adult with caring but undemonstrative severity. The movie's resolution--I'm not about to give it away here, and risk spoiling the film for you!--brings all these issues to full term in a way that satisfies both heart and soul.

I don't know whether this tradition of respect for the dead persists in Japan today. I suspect, as in all things, that the treatment of remains has become somewhat Americanized. This movie does, however, give pause. I do find that the recent emergence of hospice care has greatly improved the lot of the dying. That's wonderful. Both Ellie's mother and her stepmother were accorded comfort and respect as they lay dying. We have much to learn, though, from what this movie has to teach us about the respect that is equally appropriate after death. We call in the undertaker, who trundles the corpse off on a gurney, to be prepared for burial or cremation in some anonymous work space, distant from both home and loved ones. In this movie, the body is accorded loving care until extinction in the flames.

I trust that no one will be put off by this lovely film's subject matter. Take my word for it, this work makes death look really quite beautiful--of not exactly inviting!

Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 2/22/2010

When we come into contact with the other person, our thoughts and actions should express our mind of compassion, even if that person says and does things that are not easy to accept. We practice in this way until we see clearly that our love is not contingent upon the other person being lovable.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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Big Mind Workshop BERLIN 2008 - Genpo Roshi

Big Mind Workshop BERLIN 2008 - Genpo Roshi
This DVD presents a highly original and accessible pathway to self-discovery and personal liberation. Since 1999 the Big Mind process has been experienced by many thousands of people in seminars across America. Big Mind employs a Jungian voice dialogue technique that enables people to step out of limited self-concepts into awareness of their many different sub-selves (emotions/mental states). In addition to exploration of the more familiar sub-voices like anger and fear, author Zen Master Dennis Genpo Merzel uses this technique to help people access the ever-present Big Mind/Big Heart awareness - the clear, "just being" awareness and the unconditional compassion that we all can experience. Benefits: Access to our innate wisdom, compassion and equanimity; openness of mind and ability to shift perspectives; greater presence and empowerment; and appreciation for the wisdom within all of our many sub-selves even ones we tend to dislike or disown, like fear and anger.

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BBC - Sue Johnston's Shangri La

BBC - Sue Johnston's Shangri La

Sue Johnston goes in search of her life long dream - to find the lost world of Shangri La.

We follow Sue as she sets out to find her childhood dream - Shangri La. Sue first came across the story of Shangri La as a 16 year old in 1959 when she watched the old black and white movie, Lost Horizon, with her mother on their first black and white TV. The film was based on a book written by James Hilton in 1933. She read the book voraciously and has been re-reading it over the years since. As a child she was always fascinated by the orient and the mysteries of the far east. But in those post war austerity days in Merseyside the chances of ever following her dream seemed unattainable goal. Then life took over. She got married, had a child, started a very successful acting career, got divorced and the dream slipped further and further away - into the dark forgotten corners of her mind.

Recently as her life started to change. Her son left home and settled into his own life and her parents died.. Her sense of mortality hit home so she decided that it was time to try and follow that childhood dream. She decided to go in search of Shangri La - to find the inspiration for Hilton's book, the story of Lost Horizon.

We follow Sue on her quest through SW China's Yunnan Province and into Tibet, traveling over high mountain passes, into deep hidden valleys and gorges, through bustling towns and ultimately on horse back to her final destination, the scared mountain of Kawarkapo and the beautiful tiny isolated village of Yipung on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau - fulfilling a childhood dream to find the mysterious world of Shangri La.

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Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 2/21/2010

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air,but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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Tiger Woods Credits Buddhism in Helping Him Deal with Cravings.

(PHOTO: [Getty images] Tiger Wood's embraces his mother who is a devout Buddhist)

Personally I don't care too much about the whole Tiger Woods "scandal" except how Buddhism fits into it. I'm not one of these people who feels that Tiger Woods personally owes me an apology or any kind of explanation of what he's dealing with. He's apologized to the public and yet that's not enough for some people. They want their pound of flesh. Why do some people live through the lives of celebrities like they are apart of their lives to where they'd deserve an apology? Just leave him and his family alone to deal with their issues. The media is asking, was his apology enough to gain the forgiveness of the public?" As if we all are apart of his personal life!!

This obsession we have in America of worshiping celebrities and then tearing them down when they show that they're human, (just like us) is a highly corrosive aspect to our society. It is escapism to live vicariously through other people, so that we don't have to face our own struggles, obstacles and weaknesses. So, when these celebrities inevitably miss the mark of perfection we feel let personally let down because we have this delusion that our happiness is somehow tied up into how they live their lives. Personally, I think that this incident is between him and his wife but he said in his public statement that Buddhism is helping him deal with his sexual attachments and that's what I'd most like to focus on in this post. Woods said:

"I have a lot of work to do, and I intend to dedicate myself to doing it. Part of following this path for me is Buddhism, which my mother taught me at a young age. People probably don't realize it, but I was raised a Buddhist, and I actively practiced my faith from childhood until I drifted away from it in recent years. Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously I lost track of what I was taught."

James: Buddhism is a compassionate religion, which I think demands that we give people a second chance because who amongst us hasn't needed one ourselves? I think we should be supporting him whole-heartedly in his pursuit to free himself from samsara. It is quite common for humans to turn to spirituality in times of need and suffering. In that sense perhaps something good can come out of the ashes of Tiger's previous life. In some ways our suffering does us a favor in channeling us toward a path to free ourselves from that misery but you can't force that path onto someone who isn't ready. I think that is in part why we Buddhists don't do much proselytizing. Buddhism doesn't come to you, you have to come to it. Because proselytizing often involves using coercion and fear, which causes suffering. So you're basically causing people suffering to get them to overcome their suffering!! It's a futile exercise. Once Tiger was ready, the teacher arrived to help him blaze a new trail, and I for one wish him the best and support his recovery and dedication to living a life with less suffering.

Perhaps in a strange way to others, Tiger Woods is a role model again in drawing attention to how much attachments can make us suffer and how one can go about alleviating it. So says renowned Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, "The fact that people could see this kind of behavior causes suffering is an incredibly important message for all kinds of people who respect Woods." If someone with such a high profile as Woods can inspire others to deal with their own toxic suffering then this whole situation will have been positive overall. That is where he'll find redemption. He has the potential in this moment to inspire countless people to excel at more than golf. Besides working through this with his family, I can't think of a better way for him to find the redemption he seeks. The compassion in Buddhism is seen in part how each moment we can start a new. May Tiger, his family and his ex-lovers find the peace and happiness that all sentient beings deserve.

~Peace to all beings~

Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 2/20/2010

You who are journalists, writers, citizens, you have the right and duty to say to those you have elected that they must practice mindfulness, calm and deep listening, and loving speech. This is a universal thing, taught by all religions.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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On Greatness: From My Friend, Gary

Dear Peter,

My accident [a broken shoulder] and your questions regarding greatness caused me to search for this in my notes from 35 years ago when after the Nam I had retreated to the Navajo clan my father worked with when I was a child. That clan of Nazzi was close to the Hopi clan Parrot, where I first read this story.

It calls to me now when I most wish to gather strength.

Love to you and Ellie,

Gary

A HOPI ELDER SPEAKS

"You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered . . . 


Where are you living? 


What are you doing? 


What are your relationships? 


Are you in right relation? 


Where is your water? 


Know your garden.

It is time to speak your Truth.

Create your community. 


Be good to each other.

And do not look outside yourself for the leader.

“Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, "This could be a good time!" 

"There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are torn apart and will suffer greatly.



"Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt. 



"The time for the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word struggle from you attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. 



"We are the ones we've been waiting for"-- attributed to an unnamed Hopi elder 


Hopi Nation, Oraibi, Arizona

In a postscript, Gary adds:

To be more specific regarding the origin myths of the Hopi, and there are several, the sun is where life came from and it is Spider Woman or Huruing Whuti the Deity of all hard substances, who lived in a Kiva under the sea until the sun evaporated much of the ocean. The gods sent a wren over the land to see if any life existed.

The wren missed Spider Woman's Kiva as it looked much like the earth. Sent back to look again she was found after a very thorough search. She controls all the powers of life along with Snake. Not surprising considering the poison contained in many of these creatures. It is Spider Rock, a 1100 rock spire within Canyon De Chelly at Chinle, AZ where adolescent boys became men by climbing up to meet Spider Woman, always the oldest female priest within the Hopi Tribe who initiated the boys with the hallucinogen peyote.

Their dream/hallucinations were guided by her to instill reverence for the old ways and myths. Spider Woman's Kiva had a hole in the western interior floor where she lived. Humans emerged from this hole guided by Spider Woman towards the outside world. Hopi's believe that an event will occur and they will return back to the ground from whence the came.

To which The Buddha Diaries adds: The great truths are not the monopoly of one religion, nor of a single set of metaphors and symbols. There are many beautiful ways to honor the powerful and mysterious forces of the universe and our place in it. Much of the wisdom above--though not the myth--could have come from the mouth of the Buddha.

Mark Chamberlain: Tribute to an Artist

A great crowd, last night, at the Soka University Art Gallery for the opening of Laguna Beach-based artist Mark Chamberlain's "Reflections of an Armchair Arteologist"--a retrospective that covers several decades of his work. It's a fine celebration of a long career dedicated not only to the art of the camera--his principal medium--but also to large-scale murals and installations, works in collage and assemblage, and collaborative works involving not only his associate, Jerry Burchfield but also, in one notable instance, an entire community.

"Arteologist" is Chamberlain's neat neologism, which aptly describes the way he works. His curious eye impels him to "dig" with his camera into the reality that surrounds him, whether natural or cultural. Acutely aware of the passage of time, his pictures seek passionately to preserve momentary events before they are gone, to mark the occasion of their passing, or sometimes to draw attention to their transition as they wither and die. He is fascinated by "Fossils"--the title of a long series of photographs which document, with sometimes ironic amusement and sometimes gentle sadness, the phenomena that characterize this moment of our American civilization--a gas station, a neon sign, a billboard--with the wise understanding that they are very soon, in the great sweep of time, destined to be things of the past.

Finding the beauty in everyday reality, Chamberlain brings his meticulous craftsmanship to the creation of images that convey that reality in its smallest, most intimate detail. His pictures engage us not only in the phenomena his keen eye selects, but in the enduring mystery of their presence in the world. In his assemblage work--not widely represented in this exhibition--that same fascination with the mystery and temporality of objects leads him to extricate them from their original, mostly superannuated context, and invent for them a new, often whimsical new life in art.

It's this same embrace of the world's reality, I believe, that leads this artist to his broader concerns for the natural environment and for a more harmonious co-existence with the planet. He has been a fierce leader in the defense of the natural surroundings of the small jewel of a city in Southern California where he has lived and worked for many years, against the predatory assaults of suburban developments and the highways built to service them. Included in the exhibition is extensive documentation of The Tell ...

... a huge collaborative photomural project built in part as a community statement in defense of the Laguna Canyon, against plans for yet another new Orange County housing tract. Long protected from all the suburban sprawl by its "green belt" of wilderness land, Laguna Beach is a unique community increasingly hemmed in by commercial real estate interests, and its citizens are engaged in continuing vigilance and activism to maintain its integrity.

The walls of "The Tell" were plastered with family photographs and memorabilia brought in by hundreds of such people in a demonstration of solidarity and communal dedication to a sustainable civic future. "The Tell" itself--its title is a reference to the trove of an archeological dig--was thus a meeting place of past, present and future, a celebration of what is now and a fraught vision of the "fossil" that it might become. (The building of the 73 toll road, also the target of protests by Chamberlain and the town's community, was seen as another step in this direction.)

Chamberlain's activism, as Lagunatics well know, has not been restricted to environmental and civic concerns. His gallery, BC Space, has also long been a feature of the Laguna Beach landscape. Modest in scale--though not in vision--and almost anonymous in its lack of store-front appeal, this gallery has provided continuing, active support for artists of the region; not those "beach artists", I hasten to add, whose work attracts the eye of summer tourists, but serious working artists devoted, for the most part, to the kinds of issues that Chamberlain addresses. I tend to see it as yet another realization of the artist's vision, an act of aesthetic generosity that extends his embrace of what he loves.

Kudos to Soka University, then, for this act of recognition, which is at once well-deserved and timely. We are rapidly reaching crisis point in what we are pleased to think of as our culture, and a great deal of the art we generate is toothless mainstream stuff. Chamberlain reminds us that it's possible for an artist to have a social conscience, and to participate, as an artist, in the preservation of the best of what we have.

Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 2/19/2010

We must not be attached to a view or a doctrine, even a Buddhist one. .. . The Buddha said that if in a certain moment or place you adopt something as the absolute truth, and you attach to that, then you will no longer have any chance to reach the truth. Even when the truth comes and knocks on your door, and asks you to open the door, you won't recognize it. So you must not be too attached to dogma--to what you believe, and to what you perceive.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 2/18/2009

If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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Greatness

I've been thinking about greatness. My eye was caught by a headline in last Saturday's NY Times Arts section, "Their Goal: To Regain Oscar's Old Luster." And I wondered if that would ever be really possible again. Is it just me, or are even the movie stars smaller than they used to be? Do Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and Leonardo di Caprio have the stature of a Cary Grant, a Bette Davis, a Humphrey Bogart? I ask myself whether this is simply the nostalgia of one who looks back at the past and sees everything to be bigger--and better. Or whether there is indeed something about our culture that resists, even despises greatness? Is there something about us that refuses to acknowledge any other person to be greater than ourselves? Do we suffer from a need to bring everyone down to our scale?

I've been thinking, in this context, about Barack Obama and FDR. The system of government we have created in recent decades seems to have made it impossible for a President to achieve great things; everything must be done in small increments, with a fight at every step along the way. No grand gestures, no imperial posturing. If Obama has greatness in him, I see him in his current predicament as a Gulliver tied to the ground by a million frightened Lilliputians. And I'm unable to determine where the fault lies--whether it's some weakness in our President, or the power system we have enabled to oppose him. I'm inclined to think the latter, because I see it in every aspect of our lives: great men and women made small by the envy and pusillanimity of those around them. I'm inclined to see it as an unfortunate aspect of a culture that worships the individual--and, by extension, the self.

We have become so self-important, all of us. We see little beyond our own restricted horizons, what I need, what's best for me. And we scale our leaders down to fit into that world picture in which the "I" assumes centrality. They are no better than ourselves, we do not trust them to know more than we do (which is, in too many cases, little!) and will not allow them to act in any significant way. We thwart them, for fear that their power will overpower our own. The result is the paralysis we see in Washington today, where every Senator has become his or her own President, and every Congress member a righteous promulgator of his or her own immutable and indisputable truth.

It takes not only "leadership" to make a leader, but also a significant number of people willing to be led. To be willing to be led requires not only the inspiration of a "leader", but also a readiness to sacrifice some part of one's own sense of how things should be done. We are always eager to point to the inadequacies of others; we are slow, however, to recognize, still less acknowledge, and yet still less remedy our own. So we remain mired in the pettiness that hobbles us, and shake our fists in anger and frustration at those hobbled by that pettiness. What a sad and foolish irony, for a nation that fosters the illusion of its "greatness"!