Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 10/31/2010

"Sometimes one creates a dynamic impression by saying something,and sometimes one creates as significant an impression by remaining silent."

~His Holiness the Dalai Lama

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THE RALLY

We were there. We made it to the Rally to Restore Sanity. If you look closely, you can see us right... there! We couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't move. It was great.

I'm not going to call it "Jon Stewart's" rally, because it was far more than that. I urge you to treat anything you read in the papers or saw on television with skepticism. I caught a couple of reports on TV last night which gave absolutely no sense of the occasion. I ran through some of the front page reports in the newspapers this morning. I heard that the Park officials had declined to give an estimate of attendance. I found a link to this report on attendance in Capitol Hill Blue which seemed a bit closer to the mark.

Let me describe my own experience, which will give you some idea. Ellie and I got up at five-thirty in New York City and made our way to an already crowded Penn station to board the fully-booked 6:45 AM Amtrak train to Washington. At Union Station, we were met with already dense crowds as we made our way to the Metro to get out to our friends' house in the Chevy Chase area. Greeted by our friends, we dropped off our bags and headed back to the Metro a little before noon, knowing we'd be a bit late for the start...

The Friendship Heights Metro station was a mob scene...

People were waiting in lines ten deep to board the downtown trains. It was clear that the Metro system was utterly unprepared for the invasion. The first train came by, so packed that not a single one of those on the platform could board. We decided to head in the opposite direction, hoping to find a station further out where we'd at least be able to board a train. Unfortunately, half the other people had decided on the same tactic. The outbound trains were almost as crushed as the inbound.

We did manage to board this time, and detrained at the next station out. The situation there was identical. Huge crowds waiting to board, packed trains arriving and departing. Determined to make it, I literally dove through the door of the next train, dragging Ellie behind me. A very large woman in a very large motorized wheelchair gained enough sympathy from passengers to make space for her, and she motored forward--over Ellie's foot. Ellie screeched. The doors closed, leaving our friends gesticulating from the platform. The train moved off.

The rest of the stations along the way were all the same. The platforms were packed with people, the train so full...

... that not one single person could squeeze aboard. In all this mass of people, one man got angry, shouting at those who were trying to board the train. He was soon quelled by fellow passengers. The large woman in the wheelchair needed to get out from the opposite side of the train at Dupont Circle. Miraculously, the crowd opened, inch by inch, ahead of her, and closed, inch by inch behind her. There was a great cheer when she managed to make it to the platform.

We all got off at the Archives station. The flow of people was incredible...

A few hardy souls were trying to make it back in the opposite direction. The tenor of their remarks was "You don't know what you're in for." The monster crowd made its way up to street level, disgorging onto Seventh Street...

... which was as packed, as far as the eye could see, with crowds nearly as dense as the enclosed Metro car. We elbowed our way through three or four blocks to the Mall, meeting more and more resistance along the way. By the time we reached the Mall, it was a matter of shouldering a path through the recalcitrant masses until we reached the middle of the Mall. From here, across the oceans of people, we could just catch a distant glimpse of the single large screen erected by the stage, hear the snatch of a song by Cat Stevens or a speech by Sam Waterston...

(In the far distance, beside the statue in that last picture, you can just make out a corner of the large screen beside the stage.)

Police cars and ambulances parted the crowd a foot at a time with screaming sirens. Otherwise, it was a single giant sardine can of serried ranks of people. The big moment in our part of the rally came when a young man tried to scale a tree to get a better view. He had a hard time, couldn't make it despite hands reaching down from above to help him up. Couldn't, and couldn't make it... The crowd began chanting, "Yes, we can," "Yes, you can," and finally, finally, with help, he scrambled up into the branches. A great roar of approval from the crowd, as though we had all managed the feat ourselves.

We stood there, trapped...

... for a good two hours, surrounded by people who, like us, had showed up. We saw nothing, heard nothing of what was happening on the stage. It was great! But it was clear that, like the Metro system, neither the rally organizers not the Mall officials had been prepared for the numbers that showed up. A lot more amps, a lot more big screens would have been helpful to the literally hundreds of thousands who were in the same position as ourselves: they saw nothing, heard nothing. And yes, I think everyone shared the view that it was great.

When we finally gave up, we reconnected with our friends via cell phone (mobile phones were inoperative on the Mall) and found them a couple of blocks further back towards the Washington Monument...

Rejoining them there...

... we spent another hour watching the crowds with their wonderful signs...

.... and, many of them, with their Halloween costumes. The crowds were less dense here: people could actually move back and forth, but the flow was constant, consistently huge.

Deciding to move on, we found ourselves now more in the flow of traffic leaving the Mall. The restaurants and coffee shops were chock-a-block: no seats, no possibility of service. Anticipating still heavy traffic on the subways, we spent another hour or so in the downtown area, strolling down toward the White House...

... and finding, thankfully, a bench in Lafayette Park where we could sit...

... and rest the weary bones before heading back to the Metro station. Even then, two hours after the rally was over, we found ourselves in the same situation as earlier in the day. Incredibly crowded platforms, trains running by, so full there was no room for additional passengers. We headed back to the street and thought ourselves lucky to find a taxi to take us back to our starting point.

The news reports on television, as I wrote above, had little relationship to the experience I've described. The same with this morning's papers. The media have portrayed this as a light-hearted entertainment event with a handful of stars and two well-known comedians. But as I see it, the rally was only in small part about what was happening on the stage. The vast majority of us had no idea what was happening there, anyway. No. The rally was about showing up. It was about the people who showed up in vast numbers to be counted. And to judge from media reports thus far, we were discounted. It was also about the mood and spirit of these vast numbers of people, whose signs--and whose behavior in highly adverse circumstances--reflected the civility that has been missing in this year's political discourse. It was about an aspect of the American character that is too often ignored--and which the media seems determined to continue to ignore: a mutual tolerance and compassion, a great space in which we all agree on what is right, and just, and needed for our common humanity.

The End..

A FOOTNOTE

Well, not quite the end. A last word about those numbers. I'm becoming a bit of a conspiracy theorist when it comes to the media. I heard Wolf Blitzer slip in to his monologue that "there were thousands of people" out there on the Mall. Well, no, Wolf, if I may be so familiar. Not even tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands would have been a fair way to put it. While no crowd size estimator, I believe that the estimates of 200,000 have to be low: do they take into account the masses on every access street to the Mall? The media, I believe, have a vested interest in minimizing this event, which contradicts their carefully-constructed narrative about this election--a narrative promoted by the Republicans and their corporate sponsors, who DO have a vested interest in the election's outcome. Aside from a front page picture, the New York Times featured its report on the rally on page 24!

Dalits Bravely Embrace Buddhism.

Hundreds of Dalits belonging to Chettipulam, a village near Vedaranyam in Nagapattinam district are planning to embrace Buddhism on December 6, the death anniversary of B R Ambedkar. During September 2009, the CPI(M) had alleged that the Dalits were not being allowed entry into the temple by the villagers. The party organised temple entry agitations twice - on Sep 30,and Oct 14 of that year.

James: I have been watching with interest the continued phenomena of Dalits converting to Buddhism since the revered Dalit Dr. B R Ambedkar converted giving Dalits a way out of the cruel label of "untouchable." In the Hindu caste system Dalits or "untouchables" are considered the lowest of the level of human being. The castes system was officially abolished with the drafting of the Indian Constitution but the tradition is still stubbornly held to by all too many Indians and the discriminatory suffering continues.

Traditionally Dalits were forced into the "impure" professions of: trash collectors, butchering, animal carcass removal and waste clean-up. They are sometimes still banned from entering temples because of their "impure" status. This combined with the political rights movement by Ambedkar has been the fuel that has created and perpetuates the mass conversions of Dalits to Buddhism (to read more about the political and social reality of the caste system, click here). This is all a cursory description, of course, of the very complex nature of the Dalits place in Indian society.

Buddhism was revolutionary and a bit rebellious at the time of its birth in Indian society (and still somewhat today) as it challenges and denies the existence of the caste levels. Hinduism teaches a fatalistic approach to life, whereas, Buddhism approaches it from the aspect of choice. In other words, there is a way out in this life from our present circumstances. Buddha's famous declaration on the matter was, "Birth does not make one a priest or an outcast. Behavior makes one either a priest or an outcast." Buddha himself was born into the warrior caste in ancient India.

Indeed Buddha believed that one's past lives were but one aspect to what determined who we are as a person in this present life. However, unlike the Hindus he taught that we can change this through our actions in this life. We aren't segregated into a less equal status for life simply for being born into a certain family. The caste system doesn't allow for advancement or change in one's existence in this life, and seeing how there are virtuous and less virtuous people in all the castes points more toward Buddha's theory that our personalities are shaped more by our actions than by birth outcome.

In the face of all this I have wondered what tradition of Buddhism are these new Buddhists embracing. As it turns out, their own. Theirs is often an ecclectic form of the Dharma that is based upon the traditional Theravada tradition but borrows as well from Mahayana and Vajrayana. They are very socially engaged Buddhists stemming from their movements political campaign for greater rights in their homeland of India (SOURCE: Queen, Christopher S. and Sallie B. King: Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist liberation movements in Asia: NY 1996: 47ff. u.A.). The eclectic nature and socially engaged focus of these Buddhists is shared within the emerging western, Buddhist cultures, and is in part why I am so interested in its emergence in modern Indian society. May all Dalits find the way out of their suffering -- as may all of us.

~Peace to all beings~

PITMEN

I'm writing this Friday evening, because we leave via Amtrak for Washington DC early tomorrow morning, Saturday, and I will not have time to make an entry, probably, before Sunday. The Rally to Restore Sanity is scheduled to start at 12 noon, and we'll hardly have time to drop off our bags at our friend's house before heading back to the Mall. I'm "fired up," as Obama likes to say.

I did not have time, after my long entry on the Chelsea galleries, to mention our evening's theater outing. Briefly, then...

It was a strange feeling to be sitting in a New York theater in 2010 and to be taken back to the precise place (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England) and time (mid-1930s) of my birth. My father was at the time the vicar of St. Cuthbert's Church, and his parishioners were mostly miners and their families, and all Geordies (Tynesiders.) I'm inordinately proud of being a Geordie, even though I spent only the first year and a half of my life there; and no one could possibly tell my origin by my accent (mid-way across the Atlantic.)

The play that took me back all those years was Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters...

... the story of the Ashington Group, a small company of proud Geordie miners who took to painting under the tutelage of one Robert Lyon, a pit of a toff and an art historian and painter, and ended up wowing the pre- and post-war art establishment with their raw realism. The play is about their struggle with identity, masculinity and, particularly, class, at a time when England was more strictly divided than it is today.

It's also about art--about the clash between realism and abstraction, about the social responsibility of the artist, about what, and how art "means." Needless to say, there's a lot of talk and the talk--even though the Geordie accents are somewhat attenuated for an audience which otherwise would not understand a word!--is sometimes hard to follow. The ear--and the mind--tend to tire towards the end, and I myself longed for a little more action that I was allowed. Still the often heated exchanges were a lot of fun, the passions ran high, and the conflicts were real and touching. And I was glad, for a couple of hours, to be taken "back home" to Northumberland and reminded of the grand, unquenchable spirit of those who spent their lives down in the mines.

FROM OUR BALCONY

The Best Buddhist Writing 2010. A Book Review.

How would you like to have a collection of excellent Buddhist writings all in one book for your library? Well, that's exactly what Melvin McLeod and the Shambhala editors have offered up in the "The Best Buddhist Writing" series. Each year they select the cream of the crop in Buddhist essays and other writings to inspire and edify the Buddhist community. This year they have complied one of their best, and it's not simply Buddhist masters who are featured.

You'll read heartfelt writings from people as diverse as a man on death row to Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. Death row inmate Jarvis Jay Masters was a hardened criminal who has since shed those violent ways and dedicated his life to practicing the Dharma. His narration of a short visit to a hospital outside the prison walls will make you see the present moment in an entirely new way. One that will rededicate your will power to soak up every last drop of it. He writes about the ride to and from the hospital for a basic hearing check-up and how he savored each time the car he was traveling in stopped at a red light.

It gave him precious time to take in the beauty of regular life unraveling before his eyes hungry for a glimpse of an average life. How easily do we go about our day and take for granted that we can freely walk out our door at any time and go for a walk to see things that an prisoner would give anything to experience again. The simple beauty of watching the traffic lights turn from green to red was enough to make this inmate tear up with appreciation. May we all too learn to see the world in such a pure way. This is a good book if you are looking for a collection of easy to read, inspirational tales from both Buddhist masters but also average practitioners.

~Peace to all beings~

Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 10/29/2010

"Attachment is the mind stuck to an object."

~Lama Zopa Rinpoche

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Chelsea: The Best Show in Town

If you're headed for the Chelsea gallery district in New York, as we were yesterday morning, here's a great way to go: get yourself to the 14th Street subway station and walk west on 14th to 10th Avenue, where you'll find stairs leading up to the wonderful High Line Park, recently reclaimed from an old elevated railway line that ran up the west side of the city, above the traffic. The steel railroad tracks are still visible among the plants and grasses and small trees that line the boardwalk...

... high above street level and the city's constant roar, and you're offered fine views of the river and the city below. Here's a glimpse of the Empire State Building...

You end up, currently, at the lower end of the gallery district, at 20th Street, where there's a charming piece of entropic art by Valerie Hagerty.

But work continues on a northward extension of the path, just visible through the chain link fence.

Now you're going to have to forgive me for a rave. We saw a great deal of art in Chelsea, much of it ho-hum, some of it more appealing to the eye and mind. But I'm choosing to ignore the rest and write about the Best Show in Town. (Well, I have to admit I haven't seen them all, and a good number of the big-name galleries were closed for installation. But I'm choosing to call this the Best Show in Town.)

It's at the Jack Shainman Gallery, and the artist is a Cuban named Yoan Capote. The show's title is "Mental States." The first work we encounter is a massive seascape in stark, deeply impasto'ed black and white...

(The decent images come courtesy of the gallery; the crummy ones are mine)

Gaze at it for a while, approach it a little more closely, and you discover that what you thought were thick swaths of black paint are actually densely massed barbed fish hooks. Suddenly, the huge painting becomes not merely beautiful, but dangerous.

Though epic in scale, this is poetic work which relies heavily on the richly associative quality of metaphor. (I'm reminded very much of the tradition of magical realism in Latin-American literature--a tradition also evident in Latino art of recent years.) The next work we come across in Capote's show is a crude representation of the Stars and Stripes, created out of bricks and mortar. A parallel pair of videos...

... allow us to watch its creation, cut out as a rectangular window from a wall that opens out to a view of a blue stretch of ocean, and we realize that this work is not only an object of seductive beauty in itself, but also a poignant reminder of the split between the United States and the tiny island so few miles off its coast; the flag embodies not only the spirit of freedom, but also its denial--a poignant symbol of the wall that seals off access to the promise.

That promise is evoked again in Capote's large-scale fish-hook paintings of New York.

(detail)

Though he lives in Cuba today, the artist experienced first-hand the siren call of the Big Apple on a visit a few years ago, and these paintings powerfully suggest both its seductions and its dangers for an artist--and an immigrant. The barb of the hook is unmistakable.

It is said that all art is political. If you take the time to think it through, the politics of Capote's art range from international issues of freedom, world capitalism and the history of colonialism to the personal and sexual, and its themes are as evident in the objects he creates as in his paintings. Compare, for example, the massive "Status Quo"...

... to the more modestly-scaled "Beautiful People."

The former, despite its avoirdupois and its seriousness of intention, is a rather humorous indictment of social injustice and inequality, in which the scale of the ordinary, dull bronze is heavily outweighed by its huge, polished golden counterpart. "Beautiful People", when closed, evokes the serene minimalist aesthetic of a Donald Judd...

Opened up, it delights in every form of sexual penetration know to the human species...

The politics of human sexuality is pursued in secrecy, beneath the polished veneer of respectability. (Pornography, by the way, is strictly censored by the political authorities in Cuba.) Capote is not afraid to have fun with his subversions.

I love the way Capote is able to make art that is at once beautiful to look at, radically simple in its compression of idea and image, and radically complex in associative meanings. It's the kind of art that compels you to keep looking even when you think you've got the message, whose presence is a reminder of the best of which we humans are capable. The exquisitely carved pair of sneakers in Carrera marble is at once a humorous commentary on the pretensions of art history, the "market" and the "value" of art, and finally nothing more than an admirable, beautiful and seductive object in itself.

(This image should be white, white, white!)

If ever I saw a "museum-quality" show in a commercial gallery, this one is it. It is extraordinary not only in its range, depth and scale, but also in the quality of the artist's workmanship and the passion of his ideas. If I had any influence with museum curators, I'd say, Take note!

Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 10/28/2010

"The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves."

~Pema Chodron

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Masterpieces; and Bits & Pieces

What a strange and telling contrast between the two museums we visited yesterday! We went first to the Frick Collection, walking kitty-corner across Central Park to the Upper East Side and ending up, providentially, exactly one block south of that grand palace that Henry Clay Frick built for himself at a prime location on Fifth Avenue at the turn of the last century. Like many of the very wealthy of his era, he participated heartily in the "rape of Europe," using American money to buy a vast amount of the European patrimony--which Europe, be it said, was happy enough at the time to sell off in exchange of vast amounts of American dollars.

Ah, well. What an astounding collection Frick managed to put together, and to make available to the public as a museum following his death. It's a long time since we visited the collection, and were glad we had chosen to do so again this time. Today's wealthy collectors, if they chose to go for masterpiece art, have frankly slim picking compared to this treasure trove of some of the finest of works by some of the greatest European artists, from the Italian Renaissance through the late nineteenth century. The most recent work we spotted as an interesting bullfight scene by Manet, placed interestingly adjacent to a number of paintings by Goya. Nearby, exquisitely installed to best advantage, Velasquez's masterpiece portrait of King Philip IV of Spain, "The King at War.

The great period of English art--Constable, Reyolds, Turner--was well represented in the great gallery, built specifically to provide wall space for paintings of heroic scale. Wonderful, to stand in the presence of this extraordinary output of human skill and aspiration. But my personal favorites for the day was the pair of portraits by Hans Holbein of mortal enemies Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell...

...the latter instrumental in arranging for the former to lose his head at the hands of the Henry VIII, and only a short time later losing his own to that same murderous monarch. And two, almost twin, tall portraits of infinitely elegant ladies, done with the modest palette and decorative style made fashionable by the discovery of Japanese art in the Western World.

A feast of masterpieces, then. We left the Frick and walked over to Madison Avenue, stopping for lunch at a corner bistro before heading for the Whitney Museum of American art where we wanted to see the exhibition Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective. Thek's brief life and strange contribution to the history of contemporary art ended with AIDS in 1988. After a moment of great acclaim in the 1960s for stomach-churning, hyper-realistic sculptures of raw meat and viscera exhibited in plexiglass boxes--and uncomfortable with the acclaim--Thek left New York for Europe where he spent more than a decade working on complex, collaborative installation pieces that occupied entire gallery spaces. His many paintings were essentially throwaways, done on butcher paper or newsprint, often involving washy blue underwater scenes evoking the Thek's belief that the artist's job is to mine deep into the reality of the inner self. In this context, the meat pieces seem like self-portraits of a peculiarly agonized intensity.

The most moving part of the exhibition, at least for this observer, were the two spaces at the end showing work from the last year or two of the artist's life, when he knew that he was dying. At this time in his life, he seems to have accepted--embraced--the transience of his own flesh and to have wittingly produced work that refined the spirit of suffering and ephemerality that had also characterized his earlier work. Installed at knee height in the last gallery of the Whitney exhibition, as they had been in the last show of his life, a series of small blue paintings seem to adumbrate the artist's death with a serenity that is at once remarkable and deeply moving...

The overall impression of this artist's work reminds us that, for better or worse, we have largely abandoned the motion of the masterpiece. We are left, as in Thek's work, with "bits & pieces," fragments of perception, fragments of feeling, fragments of life, put together with that sense of the authoritarian absolute that justified the masterpiece.

An interesting day. By the time we left the Paul Thek show, we found ourselves in the first rain of our New York stay. Setting out to walk across the park for a movie on the West side, we must have lost our way because we walked full circle and ended up exactly where we had started on the Upper East Side. I had walked, by this time, as far as was pleasant or comfortable, but taxis are scarce in New York in the rain, so we gamely walked back across the park--this time taking care to ask for orientation at key intervals, and found our way to Central Park West. And eventually to the theater, where we enjoyed the luxury of comfortable seats to watch "The Social Network." Excellent movie, but no review here.

Home for a soup and cheese dinner, only to find that our host has no can opener. A bread and cheese dinner, then. With a glass of wine.

The Winds of Change.

changing winds swirl

clinging golden leaf shivers
smoke escapes cabin

By James R. Ure

Recently my wife and I did some cabin-sitting for our friends. Their A-frame structure is perched on a small hill deep in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado near where I live. It is miles from any sign of civilization, which is divine. They are nearly entirely, "off-the-grid" or self-sufficient thanks to solar panels and wind turbines that our friend manufactures with a buddy at his cabin a few miles away. It's a lovely home with a sea of green pine trees interspersed with small groves of quaking Aspens for a view from their front porch. We are often welcomed to come up and camp out on their property during the summer, so we were honored to give back to them by watching their homestead for a time.

Living "off-the-grid" means changing your focus on how you use energy and other resources. Knowing that the energy for the cabin was not unlimited nor on-demand like it seemingly is in the city made us much more conscious of its use. The irony is that we are already quite environmentally conscious. It underlined the truth that actually the energy we get in town isn't in-fact unlimited as we often think. It's easy to get complacent with energy use when we live in a city because it seems so permanent. Almost every time that we flip a switch, we are flooded with energy. This lulls us into thinking that this energy will always be there for us, which can never be true. Awareness of how energy is actually created; like seeing it work from wind gave me deep insight into how the way we live our lives is creating a deficit of suffering so to speak.

We put off a lot of natural suffering by our over-consumption of energy. We run our thermostat high, so we can wear shorts inside the house during the winter, and we plug in our cell phones while running the laptop and the television. This all makes for a very luxurious life to be sure, but each time we flip on the switch we are taking years off the livability of planet Earth. And, at the same time robbing our children and grandchildren from a healthy life. It's not unlike a country borrowing money to maintain a lifestyle that's unsustainable. It's a foolish game of borrowing against tomorrow to increase the enjoyment of today. And, like any form of karma this lifestyle will come back and reward us with exactly what we have invested into it.

But the hour is not too late. We can adjust our ways and live less greedily. It's easy to see greed by people who hoard money or take what isn't theirs but it's hard sometimes to see flipping on a switch as a form of greed. That's why I think if we invested in making everyone have a direct role in providing for the energy they use by hooking up all houses with wind turbines and solar panels that we could wake up in time. Awareness (as Buddha taught) is a powerful tool that can allow us to accomplish just about anything. If we don't know the full scope of what's actually going on around us, we really are living in denial and will be shocked back into reality. Isn't it better to see that reality now and adjust accordingly so that we are at one with that reality? That way, whatever is good for us will be the same thing that's good for nature because is it really a healthy life to have so much energy that we can go shopping for crap at 2 in the morning?

PHOTO: Cabin view from front porch by James R. Ure

~Peace to all beings~