"Everybody Knows..."

First, a note of thanks to those whose responded so generously to yesterday's entry. I do like the notion that we have a growing community in these blogs that are our peculiar avocation and delight (well, most of the time!) I myself have the feeling that, as the world grows more impersonal and removed from the sense that we can in some way influence what happens in it, community is getting to be THE MOST IMPORTANT thing we need to establish and nurture. Thanks to all for joining me in making this small corner of the blogosphere matter. And now, a kind of poem called...

"Everybody Knows..."

... how hard it can be,
sometimes, to shake stuff
out of the head. Take
this very morning, when
I sat in meditation, out
in the back garden, and
the words and music
of Leonard Cohen kept
coming back—a man
of sometime tortured
now gentle and sage
substance. Last night
I watched the film
about him, “I’m Your
Man,” and the words
and music had been
playing all night long
inside my head, and they
would not stop. Yes,
"Everybody knows." Then
the words of this poem
began to come instead,
and soon the inside
of my head was busy
not forgetting them,
I wanted so much
to write them down
correctly once my sit
was done. I tried
to substitute them
with that mantra from
the end of the Heart
Sutra, gate, gate, para-
gate, parsungate,
bodhi svaha, lovely
words whose meaning
is mysterious to me,
impenetrable and, true,
I had some success
with this new approach,
the head did begin
to let go of its other
words and the mind to
empty out and focus
on the breath. Still,
did you never notice--
to misapply, once
more, those words from
the ever apt supply
of John Lennonisms--
how hard it can be?

Here's what I heard from a friend in the gym this morning: He had seen on another friend's car a bumper sicker that he loved. His friend gave him one of the same, and he promptly stuck it on the rear end of his own car. Shortly thereafter, he was driving with a young woman friend in his car and was nearly forced off the road by an irate driver who sped up behind him in a fury. My friend feared, he told me, literally for his life and for the life of his passenger. And tore the new bumper sticker off as soon as he got home.

The bumper sticker read: OSAMA BIN LADEN BELIEVES IN GOD.

Oh, and while we're on the subject... thanks to Ellie for drawing my attention to the New York Times squib on this controversy. Bin Laden depicted "in a Christlike pose"? A "Virgin Mary covered in a burqa"? This competition for religious art at the National Art School in Sydney, Australia (where, incidentally, I'm thrilled to have some regular readers of The Buddha Diaries! Please check in, one of these days!) has a new member of the art morality squad out protecting religion from scurrilous attack. Prime Minister John Howard now joins the not-so-distinguished ranks of such notable art critics as Rudy Guiliani (remember those elephant turds?) in condemning the artists Priscilla Banks and Luke Sullivan: "The choice of such artwork," thundered the good Prime Minister, "is offensive to the religious beliefs of many Australians." I'm sure those Aussies need the protection of their Prime Minister from the subversive attacks of these dangerous artists. Right, Aussies?

God... and Two Teresas

Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone ... Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.

So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?

— addressed by Mother Teresa to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated

I don't believe in God. I think I have made that clear. I don't agonize over my lack of belief. At most, while my father was still alive, I kept my disbelief under wraps for his sake, for the Anglican priest he was, at least when I was in his company, so that I would not disappoint him. I regret that now. I think that we could have had some great discussions, that honesty would have brought us closer--though by that time I had left England for good, and saw him only rarely, once every couple of years or so, for a few hurried days. I went to church on those occasions, out of respect, and perhaps a kind of nostalgia for the ceremony of it, the sights and sounds and smells...

There had been times, I knew, when my father wrestled with doubts about his faith. He lived with chronic stomach problems, chronic health problems of all kinds as he grew older. My father was a great believer in the unity of mind and body, and one who inevitably attributed others' illnesses to "psychosomatic" effects. He loved that word. It must surely have crossed his mind that his own health problems were a symptom of his inner struggle with God. It's a conversation I now wish that I'd had with him--a conversation that might have shed light on my own lack of faith, my own disbelief in the God he worshipped, and taught others--myself included, as a child--to worship with him.

So now we learn about Mother Teresa. The news media are shocked, shocked... and are convinced that we must share their alarm. I don't. It seems to me that the "dark night of the soul" is something every human being is given to experience in one way or another, and that the more sensitive among us will suffer it for longer. For Teresa, it lasted for decades. I see her struggle and read her words as poetry. It doesn't matter to me that they are centered on doubts about the Christian God. In fact, it seems almost irrelevant to me. I have a friend who has suffered it for years, so far as I know a non-believing Jew with a true heart and a fine intelligence. I believe that some few people are given more to suffer than the rest of us. Perhaps it is in some strange way their choice, but it's sad to think of it that way.

There is, of course, as Teresa put it, "such deep longing for God," for some hard evidence that our lives have greater depth and meaning than might seem to be the case, given a brief and sometimes brutish sojourn on this planet Earth. All the beauty in the natural world and in the greater universe is not satisfying for some, who need to project a reason and a justification for these phenomena on some unseen, guiding hand, an "intelligent" designer who oversees their workings and demands obesiance. Should they seek solace from him/her/it in the form of some returned communication--a prayer answered, an intention approved--and should they fail to hear the answer that they seek, they may well find themselves, as Teresa, "repulsed — empty — no faith — no love — no zeal. — [The saving of] Souls holds no attraction — Heaven means nothing — pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything."

It's a piteous plea, and one that sounds a deep emotional truth about the far end of the spectrum between ecstasy and despair. I do not question Mother Teresa's cry of despair any more than I question the ecstasy of that other Teresa,
Teresa of Avila, whose passionate surrender at once to Thanatos and Eros--at least in Bernini's awesome image of her--is also profoundly moving in its sheer humanity, profance, erotic and saintly in the very same breath. It's all poetry to me, and meaningful as such. I don't need God to explain either one to me. I don't even need the "secular spirituality" that
Deepak Chopra would have us embrace if we have abandoned the Christian faith, which seems to me to share the internal squishiness of some New Age simulacra for religion.

So, thank you for those letters, Mother Teresa. I for one don't need you to be a saint. I need you to be the human being you prove yourself to be. Though, without wishing to be cheeky, and with regard to all that suffering, I think you'd have found more comfort in the Buddha's Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path than in your Jesus on the Cross.

And Now For Something...

... completely different--though nothing ever is. As we shall see...

Ellie and I walked down the hill yesterday, late afternoon, to enjoy a glass of wine with our neighbor, the artist Marcia Hafif. A painter in the tradition of minimalist, monochromatic work, she's just completing a new series of bichromatic paintings and has them hanging in her living room. I didn't count them, but I guess there are perhaps a dozen of them, each square divided vertically into two non-equal parts whose graduated width evokes the rhythmic progression of a spare, musical composition as the eye follows the series around the room. The paintings have a silvery, silken glow to them, with barely perceptible modulations on two subdued colors, both difficult to name; one is a kind of subtly mauvish grey, the other a reduced celadon green. They would have the fluffy seductiveness of cotton candy, but for the carefully-structured formal context that lends them a quiet sobriety and depth. In keeping with the history of Hafif's work, their Zen-like reductiveness induces a state of meditative attention and serenity, but there's a gentle quality in the touch that keeps them from being severe. Up close, the artist's hand is everywhere evident in the patient brushwork and this, I think, is where the viewer is invited into the work. This is chink in the formalist armor where we come in contact with the human presence and the human values that give the work its depth of content.

Not an adequate description, perhaps, because such work defies attempts to translate it into language. I was reminded once again of the seeming contradiction in my aesthetic passions: while I'm attracted to the work of artists who persist in looking to the human form and to the landscape that surrounds us, I also get that frisson of recognition, of acknowledgement--that YES!--with reductive, even monochromatic work like Marcia's. It's the response that tells me that what I'm looking at has something vital to tell me about my own humanity.

Outdoors, on Marcia's deck, with a glass of wine, we got to talking about art, and music, and literature--but not in that awful academic way, that one-upman trade of esoteric information and display of intellect. Our conversation came, I think, out of mutual experience and the process in which we are engaged in our creative work, and the ways in which that process is fed by others who have walked the path before. So Marcia could speak easily about Fra Angelico and the painting he had made for himself, in his cell, beside the window, competing with that light source, so that its whiteness--the painting's--became central to its meaning. And somehow this gave another dimension of meaning to the work we had just been looking at, and led to more thoughts about painting and writing, and engagement with the medium as having meaning in itself. And how emotion is conveyed more vitally not by the heavy sighs but by the unspoken subtleties--which brought me back, again, to thoughts about Jane Austen.

All interesting stuff. Thinking back to yesterday's entry, and the anger, and the reticence about giving vent to it, and wondering how "Buddhist" it might be, I realize that the relationship between passion and dispassion is a close one indeed. The idea that passion can be experienced perhaps more deeply through restraint, that equanimity does not imply removal--this idea is one that's worth exploring.

I trust I haven't bored you all today, with my aesthetic speculations. To me, they're anything but abstract, like Marcia's paintings. Very present, very real. See? As the French say, Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. (Approximately: The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

AND ANOTHER EPIPHANY...

... sent to me by my friend Marsha, also an artist (though spelled differently from the Marcia above; just another of those strange coincidences!) who was reluctant to use the "Comments" button. It's a lovely story, so I append it here. Enjoy...

The lucky thing about my childhood was my father's sense of adventure and his total lack of care as to where we might end up. We went on great trips all over the west, driving for hours, days. I spent all that time looking at the land, the forms, and the horizon line. I think that is where I learned what America really is. Anyway, one summer we were traveling through Navaho country and my father announced that we were going to stay the night at Goulding's Trading Post in Monument Valley. Goulding's was known because some of the great westerns were made there by and with John Wayne, John Ford, etc. Needless to say it was not a tourist destination, as it is today. To get there meant driving miles on a two lane road through the reservation and then off on a dirt road for a while.

We arrived late in the afternoon. A storm was coming in. The place was situated high against red cliffs, overlooking the spectacular valley with its endless flat land and scattered red buttes and mesas rising straight up. It was a working trading post with some out buildings, two of which were the low slung guest quarters and the dining hall.

Once we were settled, I wandered out to where the dirt road began to slope toward the valley. There was another girl standing there looking out. She was a guest too. I don't remember her name, but I do remember being impressed because she was thirteen, which made her a big girl, and she wanted to be an anthropologist. We talked a while, watching the storm move in across the valley as the sun began to set. Then we wandered into the trading post.

It was dark with log walls. Lariats and silver necklaces hung from pegs, sort of glinting because they caught what light there was. At the back of the store in the darkness was Goulding himself, leaning on the counter with his hands spread apart. My new friend said, "It's windy outside". Goulding answered, "That's what spreads the seeds". At that moment I got the big picture. It was as if I could see and feel the whole universe and the interrelatedness of everything. The experience washed over me and was very quiet, very deep. Still is.

The storm arrived after sunset. Lighting strikes, long , skinny ones from sky to earth, lit the valley in high contrast black and white. We were so lucky because we could witness it from our little room against the cliffs.

I never told my parents or anyone about my experience for a long time. I was sort of mute about it. I just felt it and knew what it was, even as a little kid...

The Gonzales Resignation

Okay, friends, my apologies in advance but here I go again. Another rant. Is it very un-Buddhist of me to be so outraged? I don't know. But this is what's coming up for me, so here I go.

I'm not alone, surely, in concluding that the man who sits in our Oval Office--I still can't bring myself to dignify him with the title "President"--suffers from a debilitating and apparently irremediable character flaw: he seems constitutionally (!) unable to accept responsibility for anything. Ever. No matter what the circumstance. Thus, yesterday, in his mendacious remarks on the resignation of the man he had appointed to be this country's chief upholder of the law, he saw fit to blame others for having "dragged his name through the... [significant pause] mud, for political reasons," conveniently passing over his (Gonzalez's) incompetence, his rampant toadyism and his cavalier disregard for the truth; conveniently passing over his (Gonzalez's) role in the infamous torture memo, his willing participation in the abuse of those rights he was appointed to defend in the scurrilously misnamed Patriot Act, his trashing of centuries old human rights in the form of Habeas Corpus, his discreditable memory loss if not outright perjury before Senate and Congressional committees...

No matter all these and other transgressions of the law by the chief law officer of the land, he (Bush,) whose intransigeance has resulted in more bitter and fruitless partisanship than any other politician in living memory, had the gall to stand before the television cameras and impute it to others, in apparent denial or ignorance of his own partisanship and abject failures of judgment. Despicable, in my humble opinion.

This same man lays claim to salvation through religion. My question: does giving oneself to Jesus entail abdication of responsibility for oneself? I would hope not. It does seem, however, to lead certain of its practitioners into the habit of casting guilt and shame on those who do not share their rectitude. Am I guilty of hypocrisy here? My own "religion," such as it is, teaches (not preaches, please!) that our actions have consequences--the very subject of last Saturday's retreat: "dependent co-arising,"If this, then that. Good actions, springing from good intentions, lead to good outcomes. From those actions which prove, through their results, unskillful, we are invited to learn not to repeat them.

Seems like a good and healthy principle to me. It leaves no one to blame for anything that happens but myself. Such a revolutionary idea. I wonder, though, does this religion (Buddhism) deprive me of the right to be critical of those I perceive to be in error? I would hope not. But when I get so angry--as, today, at Bush--does it not behoove me to express that anger? Or does the expression of it result simply in more chaos and confusion in the world? Does my anger reflect the kind of rectitude, on my part, that I so readily attribute to them? A bit of a conundrum here, I think. But I would not wish to be silent in the face of what I see to be harmful unskillfulness on the part of others.

A Mile in Her Shoes

I notice that I have been reading more than my usual share of novels this summer, and finding them more than usually pleasant reading. The latest is Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I'll confess I would likely not have picked it out from the bookstore shelves, had I not bumped into the author at a reading a couple of months ago. I'm glad I did, because her book reminded me of the gentle pleasures of reading Jane Austen, of the English countryside and the now somewhat faded elegance of Bath, and of the polite eccentricities of the English character. It also put me in mind, throughout, of a valuable Buddhist teaching.

Rigler's conceit is an amusing one. Our Jane Austen addict, Courtney Stone, a twenty-first century, post-feminist, Los Angeles-based protagonist-- she has her own MySpace website--wakes up one day to find herself inhabiting the mind and body of "Jane Mansfield" in Austen's early nineteenth century England. The ensuing romp through the exquisite agonies and politenesses of that era shed light not only on the nostalgic view of a life more simply defined by a rigorous social code--but also on its too readily forgotten hazards: its awful sanitary conditions no less than its relegation of women to the property of males. Rigler's Courtney observes it all with the cynical eye of a "liberated"--and recently jilted--woman who obsesses not only about her beloved Jane Austen but also about such things as cleanliness and creature comforts of the kind distinctly unavailable in Austen's day.

And then there's "love"--so differently defined and practiced in the two eras that clash together in this book. For Courtney, it's about sexual politics, sexual freedom, the freedom to choose partners, it's about her womanhood, her individuality, her strength--and weakness. And she suffers. For "Jane", it's about financial security and social convention, family, propriety and property. "Love" as we understand it in our century--something to be fallen into--has hardly entered into the social vocabulary of Jane's time, it's there only as a glimmer of romanticism and the freedoms that aesethtic movement had begun to claim. It's there, in Jane's heart, as a hope almost beyond hope to be fulfilled. Sex, so subtly sublimated in Jane Austen's world into the delicate, precise dance of language and social mores, is an omnipresent but forbidden topic, a delicious undertow fraught with fears and inhibitions.

Rigler, herself clearly a Jane Austen addict, has a sure feel for these matters in both "Jane's" world and Courtney's. Venturing into the risky territory of nineteenth century English as a contemporary American whose native language is the vernacular of twenty-first century California, she proves sure-footed amongst the booby-traps--and as a native English English speaker, I'm sensitive to the potential lapses. Her plotting, too, is nicely handled: the reader's attention is engaged by the story line throughout, and the ending--long anticipated, because we're kept wondering how our Courtney is ever going to escape her predicament--is astutely satisfying: it serves at once to resolve and deepen the mystery of Courtney's time-warp, and leaves the reader empowered to speculate on its meaning.

For those who fall into the trap of dismissing Jane Austen's novels as romantic fluff, and might be tempted to do the same with Rigler's, it should be added that Courtney takes her identity crisis seriously even as she seems to simultaneously enjoy the ride and worry about the return trip to her "real self." Along the way, this material girl is required to re-evaluate her own sense of self, and is confronted constantly with that great teaching of Buddhism I mentioned earlier: the "other" mind-body she inhabits requires her to actually experience the conundrum of not-self, "this is not me, this is not mine, this is not who I am." And thus confronted, she sheds some of her narcissism along the way and learns the value of compassion for those who share the journey with her.

A good read, then. I learn from an email from Laurie, received coincidentally this very morning--that she has reached #15 on the LA Times bestseller list for fiction. Here's hoping, for her, for a #1 spot soon!

Retreat

Today is retreat day with Thanissaro Bhikkhu. The topic is dependent co-arising. No post for today, and I may even extend my silence into tomorrow. We'll see. Have a great weekend.

God's Warriors; The Buddha Diaries Recommends

Now that I've watched all three segments of Christiane Amanpour's CNN special, God's Warriors, I'm left wondering why the series left me feeling so dissatisfied. True, it was mostly interesting to watch (though I'll confess I dozed off a couple of times: chalk it up to the late hour, for this vacationing geezer), and the topics were thoroughly discussed. What was missing, for me, I think, was a sense of the controversy and outrage that swirl around the influence of religion in current political life. This may have had to do with Amanpour's decision to separate her three segments by religion, Jewish one evening, Muslim the next, and Christian the last. The fact that they never came head to head in the broadcast--the source of such animosity and bloodshed in the real world--made them seem insulated from each other, and thus relatively benign.

Lacking, too, was any real critical analysis of the views that Amanpour generously allowed the subjects of her interviews to discuss. There was little effort even to present opposing views. We saw a procession of mostly well-meaning folk whose passionate embrace of their particular religious bias seemed, well, almost laudable without the context of the dire results of their fanaticism. What's deeply troubling is not that strong religious views exist, but that their intolerance of other views results in terrorist acts, hostility, and outright warfare. It's the clash that is causing such problems in the world, and the clash that the series format effectively avoided. Amanpour's careful and compassionate listening was impressive, but left this viewer wanting more by way of challenge.

That said, I think that we progressive, liberal democrats do ourselves a serious disfavor by too easily discounting the depth of the contemporary desire to rediscover the values that religious practice--in all its manifestations--once represented. There's clearly something going on in the world, some major shift in consciousness, in reaction perhaps to the scientific and philosophical rationalism that has dominated human thought since the eighteenth century and that brought with it the industrial and technological revolutions. It seems evident, at the beginning of the 21st century, that while these may have brought "progress" on the material front--flush toilets, refrigerators and, yes, even the computer on which I write and post this entry in the blogosphere, these are surely advantages we would be reluctant to live without--they have also left an aching void in the life of the human spirit. As I see it, these warriors of God are seeking, each in their own way, to fill the void. Their mistake--again, strictly in my own view--is to be sifting through the already discredited myths of the past to find their answers.

In this context, this might be a good moment to return to...

The Buddha Diaries Recommends

... because we're happy to see that Mark, at Marko Polo and Eli at Memory Palace are both back at the keyboard and posting new entries on their blogs after a prolonged absence. (I guess summer breaks for students tend to break up the rhythm of the year.) Anyway, here are two young bloggers who are not loath to engage in the hard process of wrestling with religious ideas and beliefs, and are willing to question their own as well as listen to others. It's good to stay in touch with the heartland, where they reside. And I mean that in both senses of the word. I'm looking forward myself to hearing more from them.

Reading

A strange and disturbing experience yesterday morning. I woke to find myself nearly unable to see. My vision was severely blurred by a kind of dancing aura of light that prevented me from focusing on any single point. By coincidence, I had made an appointment for an eye check-up the same afternoon, and the doctor had no difficulty in diagnosing what he called an ocular migraine. No headache, just the aura I've known about before as a symptom of the more familiar type of migraine. A "blinding headache" minus the ache. I did worry, for the few minutes that it lasted, that my eyesight was finally failing. My first worry was how I'd ever manage to write the blog: visions (!) of having to dictate it to Cardozo! And would I have to learn braille if I wanted to read?

Would I learn the equanimity I might need to cope with such an affliction?

Well, it only lasted for a half hour or so, and I soon managed to write the entry which you undoubtedly read. Well, I like to think you might have done. This morning, I just wanted to add a few more words about The Glass Castle, which I also managed to finish despite the earlier eye problem. I loved the book. It's one of those stories where you end up rooting so hard for the protagonist that it hurts. It's hard to imagine such a nightmare of a childhood in the United States, with children literally sifting through the garbage after school lunch to devour the left-overs of their school-mates, and living amid filth and decay in a desolate mining town in the "care" of parents whose neglect of their children is determined not so much by a lack of education as by their willful, adamant rejection of conformity to social norms.

For the author, Jeannette Walls, who from her earliest years adored and defended her aberrant father as only a child can, her upbringing was at once a curse and a blessing. Inculcated by her mother with a love of books and by her father with an insatiable curiosity about the physical world around her, she was possessed of a mind that devoured whatever came her way. Her unconventional education required that she develop her own skills for acquiring knowledge and putting it to use--skills that have evidently stood her in good stead, in her adult life, as a successful researcher and writer. The poverty and deprivation she was forced to endure at least endowed her with a toughness of mind, a self-reliance and a resilience to the vicissitudes of life that are notably lacking in many of those growing up in the comfortable, even pampered environment of middle-class America.

It's not the kind of upbringing I'd recommend for anyone. Few, I think, would survive this kind of hardship with the success of Jeannette Walls. What saved her from a fate of resigned, redneck ignorance was surely the intellectual qualities that her parents possessed, even if they sorely misused them. Walls, in a word, is not a poster child for poverty, but rather a shining example of one who managed to escape it and a testimony to the power of the written word. Her passion for reading, this book suggests, was her salvation. Eventually it all comes down to strength of mind. Reading can do that for you. The practice of meditation, I like to think, is another way to go about it.

Even so, I'm glad to have my eyes back.

The Improbable Dream

I dreamt last night that my mother told me she had asked my father for a divorce. An improbable scenario. First, both my parents died more than a decade ago. They had been married for more than sixty years and, while my mother once confessed that things had not always been easy for her in their marriage, they came from a generation and a culture in which divorce would have been inconceivable. My father, as I mentioned recently, was an Anglican minister, and my mother was the daughter of a minister of the Church of Wales.

So the dream was clearly not about my parents. As with most dreams, I'm taking a wild guess that it was actually about myself. With no divorce on the horizon--Ellie and I have been together for more than thirty-five years--there has to be some other answer to the puzzle. I do believe that dreams come along to tell us something, they are not just random nonsense. Here's my thinking: I believe, with C.G.Jung, all of us have a masculine side and a feminine side, and my own interpretation of the dream suggests that here was my feminine side (mother) telling my masculine side (father) to get lost. Perhaps it's my more intuitive self rebelling against that rational authoritarian who spends his time telling her how to live her life.

The dream may also be related to the book I'm reading. Awaiting a trip to the bookstore to replenish my summer supply, I picked up a copy of Jeanette Walls's The Glass Castle which Ellie had borrowed from friends. I was soon hooked on this remarkable story of a child growing up with unbelievably impossible parents--an alcoholic dreamer of a father whose get-rich schemes lead inevitably to disaster, a brilliant tinkerer and rationalist; and a scatterbrain, would-be artist mother whose rampant narcissism and dedication to "adventure" results in an airy neglect of her children and their needs. Notwithstanding the dreadful abuse and the rootlessness as the family struggles to stay one step ahead of police, penury and ruin, the children benefit in unexpected ways from what love and attention their parents manage to spare them. They learn a fierce spirit of independence and creativity from their mother, and a keen understanding of the workings of the universe from their father's scientific bent.

And we readers learn a lot about the resourcefulness of children. So far as I've got in my reading of the book, they have survived. More about this, perhaps, as I get further into the story. But you can see how it might provoke an improbable mother-and-father dream...

Epiphanies

Thanks to Robin over at the Dharma Bums for the invitation to recall a moment of epiphany--one of those moments when the sign is clear that it's time to change one's life. Rather than take up too much space in the comment column of her blog, I decided to post mine here instead. It's the short version of a longer story, which I'll tell you more about at the end. Here goes:

It's the morning of New Year's Day, January 1, 1992. We're in the middle of an ongoing family crisis and I've heard recently from a professional counselor that if I want to help resolve the crisis, I need to "work on myself." I have no idea, really, what that means, but it strikes me as the last thing in the world that a polite and educated Englishman like myself would want to do. It sounds like the kind of psychobabble I most deplore. Anyway, this morning, the first of the year, I check up on my to-do lists on my desk. One is a list of phone calls needing to be returned. There are five names on the list, and every one is a Peter.

Well, that's part I. I chuckle, a little spooked. I tell myself that this will be "the year of Peter."

Part II, three months later. I find myself in Rome. I have been asked to travel here to write about "Secrets of the Sun", a major light and space installation at the Trajan Market by the Los Angeles-based artist Peter (!) Erskine. (It happens that there's a concurrent exhibition at a major gallery of the Los Angeles-based artist Peter (!) Shelton, one of the artists whose work I most admire. A constellation, then, of three Peters from Los Angeles in St. Peter's city.)

Ellie and I had been in Rome a couple of years before. Amongst the many things we had wanted to see was Michaelangelo's "Moses," one of the great art works of the ages. We had spent hours searching for the right church but--no accidents--had got lost in a maze of alleys and had failed to find it. This time around, I was determined...

Well, we find the church. It's San Pietro in Vincoli. St. Peter in Chains. We find the massive sculpture and stand, awed, behind a crowd of tourists whose guide is speaking in a language I'm not able to identify. Ellie moves off to follow some direction of her own devices and, for reasons unknown, I decide to follow the tour to their next stop. We peer down into a dark crypt chapel and the tour guide gives his spiel. When the group moves on, I take a closer look at what they have been gazing at. It's a reliquary. Contained within, I gather from a plaque, are St. Peter's chains--the chains burst asunder, as the New Testament story tells it, by the angel of the Lord who came to rescue Peter from the jail into which he had been thrown for the audacity of teaching the Christian faith in Roman times.

Well, I was born, according to the Anglican church calendar, on the Feast of St. Peter's Chains--the festival that celebrates the occasion of his release. It's how I got my name. (My father was an Anglican minister, and Peter was the "Rock," remember, who went on to become the foundation stone of the Christian church.) And it came to me--with one of those awesome shudders of realization that seize the entire body at such moments of truth--it came to me as I stood there, alone, gazing down into the crypt, that these were in some irrefutable sense my own chains, the spiritual and psychic and emotional chains that I had been carrying around with me for the whole of my life to date--and that the time had come to shake them off...

... which was the start of everything that led me to where I am in my life today, still working every day to shake off the chains where I find them, still seeking that ultimate liberation from them.

And how about you? Epiphanies, anyone?

(On an unavoidably commercial note, those curious about the continuation of the path I started on that day can find the longer version of the story and the events that followed in my memoir, While I Am Not Afraid: Secrets of a Man's Heart. It was published several years ago, but you can still find a copy on Amazon.com, I believe (from 0.18c, plus shipping! Still, the book does have a four-and-a-half star rating...) Or I'll be happy to send you one. But to cover my costs, including mailing, I'll need a check for $15 from the US or Canada, or $20 from overseas.)

Shame

The subject of shame came up after our sit at sangha yesterday--along with its handy helpmates, guilt and embarrassment--and how easily we can allow our lives to be governed by it. I recalled at once one of my favorite movie scenes, the one in "A Fish Called Wanda" where John Cleese tells Jamie Lee Curtis what it's like to be English. I looked it up online and was amazed to find the exact quote from the screenplay. Here it is (John Cleese speaking):

"Wanda, do you have any idea what it's like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone "Are you married?" and hearing "My wife left me this morning," or saying, uh, "Do you have children?" and being told they all burned to death on Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we'll all terrified of embarrassment. That's why we're so... dead. Most of my friends are dead, you know, we have these piles of corpses to dinner. But you're alive, God bless you, and I want to be, I'm so fed up with all this. I want to make love with you, Wanda. I'm a good lover - at least, used to be, back in the early 14th century. Can we go to bed?"

As usual, it's the dreadful truth lurking behind the apparent absurdity that makes you laugh. For me, having been brought up about as English as you can get, the truth was a painful one, and I came to understand the way it functioned far too late in life. The fear of embarrassment poisoned every aspect of my life, including, of course, my ability to be truthful with those I loved, or even with myself. Everything of any importance needed to be disguised behind a veil of propriety. By the same token, I know about shame, too, from my British public (read, perversely, private) school days, when shame was the weapon of choice to gain power and ascendancy.

When I finally began to understand how unacknowledged shame can control a person's life through learned reactive patterns, I learned the relationship between shame and guilt--a key distinction also brought up by one of our sangha members yesterday. Guilt, I learned, is the result of something I have done; shame is about my very being, who I am. There's a big difference, I think, between the Christian understanding of guilt and shame--the understanding with which I was brought up--and the Buddhist understanding, which seems to me now infinitely more humane. The Christian notion of "sin" can be powerfully destructive in the mind of a young person, for example, beginning to experience his natural human sexuality. It can bring about inhibitions that will last a lifetime. The sense of guilt can be a lasting punishment for my transgressions and can paralyze my ability to act in the future. Shame can permeate my very soul. Unacknowledged, unexplored, unforgiven, it can be a life sentence.

The Buddhist conception, as I understand it, is as usual much more practical and much more humane. Rather than "committing sins," we make mistakes. Morality and responsibility go hand in hand. Our actions are unskillful, and their results bring demonstrable harm to ourselves and others. We acknowledge that they have brought about undesirable results and decide not to repeat them. There's no moralistic snag in the works, no "bad" to get hung up on, none of the sticky stuff that clings to the inner being after the event, no brownie points for feeling bad about yourself.

I'm reading the new tome produced by the ever-prolific Thanissaro Bhikkhu, "The Buddhist Monastic Code." a 1,200 page translation and commentary on the monastic rules of Buddhism. It's fascinating reading. The transgressions of the rules themselves are analyzed down to the finest distinctions as to object, perception, intention and effort, and the required penalties assigned with incredible attention to those distinctions. The penalty for the worst offenses is "defeat"--or automatic disrobing. Lesser penalties involve various forms of confession and negotiation with superiors, brother monks, or sanghas. What strikes me as I read is the very practical nature of the manual: it concentrates heavily on actions and the results of actions rather than their spiritual implications, which are left unsaid.

Enough. I'm not sure that I'm making useful distinctions here for anyone but myself. And it's time to get ready to get down to the gym for my Monday morning workout. Any thoughts on this topic, anyone?

Margaritas

The trouble with margaritas, of course--at least to me--is that they taste too much like a less sweetly offensive sort of lemonade. So on a warm evening you tend to gulp them down like lemonade, with alarmingly unlemonade like consequences. The worst thing that results from an overidulgence in lemonade is the kind of frequent trips to the bathroom that those ubiquitous TV commercials warn us men about. Margaritas can lead at best to a pleasant--though definitely UnBuddhist--buzz; at worst to a nasty hangover the following morning.

Well, I'm mentioning this because I had a couple of them last night at sunset, at the celebration of the 60th birthday of a good friend at her Laguna Beach home, overlooking the elegant palm trees and the spectacular ocean view from above the trendy Montage Hotel. Not a bad place to watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean and enjoy a couple of Margaritas, you'll agree. Not a bad place to enjoy the company of a diverse group of people and exotic fare fresh from the barbeque.

Ah, but I did pay the price this morning, waking with a brain dulled by tequilla and a body somewhat heavier for the intake of too many spicy shrimp hors d'oeuvres and slices of grilled brisket. I can, however, recommend what turned out for me to be a useful remedy: a forty-five minute sit in the crisp, fresh air of the early morning, as the sun begins to rise. Birds sing, hummers hum, the distant ocean waves crash on the shore... Pretty soon, with careful attention to the breath, the creaks and groans begin to drain out as the body wakes. Pretty soon, the effect of those margaritas starts to dissipate. Pretty soon, the mind remembers the pleasures of focus and concentration.

I know, I know, a real Buddhist wouldn't have woken with a hangover in the first place. But given the undoubted error of indulgence, it's good to know that the practice offers a fine way to atone.

Hope: the Utah Mining Disaster. Earthquake in Peru.

I once devoted three weeks of meditation time to an exercise proposed by Ken McLeod in his remarkable book, "Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention." I had recently reviewed the book for the Los Angeles Times, and in the process had learned a lot about Buddhism--and a lot about myself. Ken McLeod's teaching reflects a rigorous Tibetan training, and his book is in itself an eminently practical, no-holds-barred training manual for Western readers. It puts the attentive and conscientious reader--one who is prepared to follow the author along the demanding path of meditation exercises that form the core of the book--through the paces, learning how to dismantle those reactive patterns of the mind that control our lives without our knowing it, and create barriers between us and our happiness. (By the way, my review was an enthusiastic recommendation; those interested might want to check out McLeod's website at Unfettered Mind.)

The particular exercise I'm referring to involved sitting in meditation on the infinite number of ways in which you can die in the course of a typical day. I was reminded of one of my personal favorites (!) by the dreadful ongoing saga of those miners trapped for days now in the cave-in of a coal mine in Utah and again, with a jolt, by news of that massive 8.0 earthquake in Peru last night, coinciding with more bad news from Utah with the death of rescue workers. My visualization was of a slow and terrifyingly claustrophobic death, trapped under tons of rubble after a major earthquake--the kind that is still ominously overdue in Southern California. After three weeks of this charming exercise, believe me, I had learned a lot about my fear of death!

With regard to the Utah mining disaster, every time I read or hear about it in news broadcasts, the key word has always been "hope." As the days passed, I noticed that the meaning of the word began to shift for me. At the beginning, it was benign. When hope was somehow real, before the enormity of the obstacles began to emerge--the depth at which the men were trapped, the problem of oxygen and sustenance, the daily seismic events that caused numerous delays--there seemed to be at least some basis for holding on to it. With the passage of time, however, hope seemed to become an increasingly cruel concept. On the lips of mine officials, it began to sound more and more like a desperate means to deflect responsibility, to demonstrate good faith in a situation which, it seems to this reader-in-between-the-lines, was brought about by risky mining practices in the context of a history of neglect of safety and concern for men's lives.

I was interested in Buddhist thinking about hope, so I ran a search on Access to Insight and came across this narrative from the texts, translated from the Pali by Than Geoff. In this story, we learn that the aging Ven. Khemaka, sick and in pain, was plainly irritated by the message from his fellow monks expressing their "hope" that he was getting better and feeling more comfortable. "I am not getting better, my friend," he responds with crotchety displeasure. "I am not comfortable. My extreme pains are increasing, not lessening. There are signs of their increasing, and not of their lessening." The upshot is a sermon on the five clinging-aggregates, suggesting--as I understand it--that hope is indeed a form of clinging which brings only further suffering. The lesson made sense to me in the context of the mine disaster. The longer the officials preached hope--and the longer they clung to it themselves--the greater the potential for suffering. The loss of hope, perhaps, though painful, will come as a release.

I suppose it's natural to pay may more attention to things closer to home, but doesn't it strike you as odd that the television news will spend countless hours asking pointless, repetitive, unanswerable questions with regard to the story of a mine collapse that takes the lives of (forgive me, I don't mean to take them lightly) a handful of men in Utah, but glosses over the deaths of thousands in East Asian floods with barely a mention? Of tens of thousands in famine, disease and warfare in Africa? Why did it seem important to mention that "at least one American" died in Peru, amongst those mounting hundreds? There's almost an implication that the American death counted somehow more than all those Peruvians. Curious, no?

One of Those Days

It's one of those days. I wrote a whole long piece as a Word document, to be cut and pasted as today's entry in The Buddha Diaries--and somewhere in the cutting and pasting process it got swallowed up in cyberspace. It was about a television documentary I saw about Bobby Kennedy--his growth from brash Attorney General to that long period of rage and grief over his brother's death, to his eventual compassionate aptheosis as a presidential candidate for peace and social justice, and his murder at the moment of victory over his personal demons. This all wrote itself with such fluency and ease that I don't have the heart to attempt to find the words again. So, friends, you'll just have to trust that I wrote this marvelous piece that you would have loved to read, and I would have been sitting here waiting for your oohs and aahs... Too bad. Still, as they say, there are no accidents. Maybe it was not half so good as I thought it was. Until later, then...

The Buddha Diaries Recommends

Lindsey in Lawrence

Imagine: Steinbeck-like, you decide to embark upon a journey to find America. You hop in your car and drive straight through the middle of the country, on interstate 70. Desperate for an experience that will make you feel connected to that elusive “America,” you pull off the freeway in Lawrence, Kansas. “What are Kansans like?” you wonder. You park your car somewhere, anywhere….a mall. You are standing almost exactly in the middle of the country.

You stroll into Pier 1, which looks distressingly similar to the Pier 1 on Hollywood Boulevard. Same scented candles, same funky lamps. Feeling a little sheepish for having driven halfway across America to browse through Pier 1’s impressive selection of tea light holders, you catch the eye of a young, cheerful salesperson. You think you see a spark there, something to suggest a tremendous wealth of insights and stories behind that twenty-something smile.

This is it - your moment of truth. But…how will you possibly break the ice?

Fortunately, you don’t have to. This young woman - who represents, in many ways, modern Middle America - has a blog, and many of those stories lurking behind that engaging smile are posted there in living color. All you have to do is point and click.

With its depth, breadth and regularity, Lindsey in Lawrence stands out among an assortment of other excellent blogs authored by Lindsey’s friends (such as Marko Polo and Memory Palace, which we hope will continue to update) all living in one or another of the Great Plains states. Lindsey’s posts trace an earnest, light-hearted quest for self-fulfillment, grounded in her everyday experiences as a student, Pier 1 employee, and camp counselor. The force of Lindsey’s spirited “Buddhist-Christian” existentialism helps the blog transcend the merely mundane. One of our favorite posts describes a visit to the dentist, which becomes a funny, stream-of-consciousness example of the absurd mental states sometimes experienced by those trying to achieve a constant state of mindfulness.

Quirky and humble self-analysis is the hallmark of Lindsey’s best entries. In a June post she dives into her own acknowledged materialism, concluding that, “It isn’t the things themselves that I want…I want the experiences that go along with [them].” She implies, interestingly, that our society has welded “things” and “experiences” together, and therefore to deny one’s materialism also may require an unhealthy degree of asceticism.

Lindsey’s posts are also refreshingly creative in terms of format and content. Photos, poems, stories, dialogues, and even musical posts make Lindsey in Lawrence a fun and interesting grab bag of a blog. As with all the sites recommended on this page, we encourage you to check this one out. We think you'll learn a great deal about life in Kansas, as well as a whole host of other topics. Who knows, maybe you'll decide to take that trip down I-70 after all.

WHERE IS EVERYBODY?

There they were, a million strong, in Washington DC, holding candles in their hands and joining in song: "All we are saying, is give peace a chance." A million of them. Think of it! Think of the power of it!

We were watching the DVD of "The U.S. Versus John Lennon." How this one man, among many, back then, had the courage to stand up for his beliefs and speak them out loud. John Lennon singer, songwriter, pop star, intellectual, performance artist, genius, clown... Not many, of course, had John Lennon's name, nor the platform he had to reach millions throughout the world. Not many--none other, perhaps--could attract the international media to his slightest move, his zaniest pronouncement. And yet millions did stand up for their opposition to a senseless, senselessly protracted war. There was hardly a campus, back in those days, that was not in active revolt.

So where is everybody? We know from well-publicized polls that opposition to Bush's folly in Iraq is widespread, even passionate--and yet we all sit on our duffs or peck away at our computer keyboards, hidden behind the multiple monitors in virtually every house. (I say "all," but that's not entirely true: there are a few hardy souls, like those who stand in protest every Saturday near the boardwalk in Laguna Beach. I honor them.) Where--the question is by now familiar--where is the outrage? Where are the million people flooding Pennsylvania Avenue?

The John Lennon documentary is brilliant, by the way. Our current fiasco is barely mentioned, but you can't watch it without making the comparison all along the way. And the persecution of this cheeky, iconoclastic singer by the entire weight of the United States federal government is an indignation-inspiring tale that will get your emotions roiling in sympathy. What is remarkable is that John managed to survive it. But of course he didn't. Not eventually. It took the bullets of a crazed, gun-wielding lunatic to get him, but he died for the balls he had to stand out and be heard. If you haven't seen the movie, I'd suggest you rent it... It's great just to hear those songs.

Which brings me to Katrina. Ellie and I had watched, the previous two nights (we've been doing a lot of Netflixing!) the epic Spike Lee documentary on the hurricane and its aftermath, "When the Levees Broke." Not surprisingly, it's a film about the abandonment of a city and its people by every level of government. It's about the discrepancy between the fine words some Americans speak and the fecklessness of their actions, or inaction. It's about the unique history and traditions of a truly great, truly individual, truly American city and the callous neglect with which that history and those traditions were snubbed in the wake of natural disaster. It's a depressing story of the indifference of those in power and their betrayal of the trust misplaced in them.

And then last night I heard on the BBC World News that the United States is now rated forty-second in life expectancy among the nations of the world. Forty-second! A statistic not shared, to my knowledge in any of the American media. And then in this morning's New York Times I read Bob Herbert's column on the dramatic growth in urban crime and the bloodshed left in the path of disgracefully uncontrolled guns. And I read the letters on the Editorial page about our country's failure to provide health care for forty-five million of its citizens, including millions of children, and the ruined lives that result from this criminal neglect.

And I remembered that man who stole the Democratic presidential candidates' debate last week--the one who wept before and audience of millions with the shame and indignity of being unable to provide, in his senior years, for health care for his wife; and who asked, choking with emotion, "What has happened to America?" And I hear the familiar chorus of voices that keep inanely bleating that old cliche, the "This is STILL the greatest country in the world," and I wonder...

Ellie reports that she has been sleeping poorly for the past few days. Today she decided that it was likely due to her distress in watching those movies before bedtime--two days' worth of Spike Lee and, last night, John Lennon. What kind of a country have we become, she wondered aloud? What's happened to America? I myself had woken grumpy, and "got out the wrong side of the bed." When I heard what Ellie had to say, I could understand why.

Is Religion Necessary? (The Answer)

Okay, you'll all be keen to hear, this morning, how Than Geoff responded to the big question I had been mulling since I woke yesterday: Is religion necessary? I was nervous about asking it for two reasons. First, I tend one of the more vociferous members of the group and invariably have a lot of questions on my mind, and often find myself holding back for fear of hogging time when others might be wanting to step in. And secondly, as I thought about my question during the day, I began to realize that I had asked the same one many times throughout the years, though perhaps in different forms. As I noted yesterday, it springs in part from a long-held emotional aversion to religion that I find hard, if not impossible to shake; and in part from an intellectual skepticism that doubts the existence of a God or a life after death that I have always thought to be the basis of all religions, including--as to the latter--Buddhism.

So what did Thanissaro Bhikkhu have to say? It depends, he said, on your definition of religion, and the definition that he offered will come as a no-surprise surprise to many, as it was to me: religion, as he sees it, is quite simply the pursuit of true happiness. Not happiness. True happiness. Because happiness in the forms in which most of us seek it--material comfort, sexual satisfaction, family, and so on--is the kind that can be taken from us at any moment by the whims of fate. Wealth can evaporate, those close to us can die, we ourselves can be stricken with disease of injury... But no, nothing can deprive us of true happiness, as Than Geoff defines it for us, because it's an inner happiness--one that does not depend others, nor take anything from them. It's the kind of happiness, indeed, that gives us the freedom to be present for others without reservation, since we have nothing to lose and everything to gain from theirs.

I followed up with questions arising from my own understanding of religion--that it requires belief in "transcendence" of some kind, in something beyond the brief span of life between birth and death, a metaphysical dimension that cannot be validated by science or human reason, or even by human experience, but only by faith. Than Geoff was gently insistent in shifting these notions to one side and returning to the simple, pragmatic, experiential view. Asked by another questioner what were the basic tenets of Buddhism as a religion, he was equally uncomplicated in his response: they all boil down to the single belief, he said, that our actions have consequences, and that their quality depends on the quality of our intention in making them.

I asked about skepticism: does it promote unhappiness? Again, a carefully balanced response, to the effect that yes, of course, on the one hand, used unskillfully, it can have that result; but used skillfully, it's an essential ingredient of Buddhist faith, since the Buddha himself taught us to question everything. I asked whether he had read any of the recent books on atheism, and he responded with an amusing story about a nightmare encounter with Sam Harris, in a telephone conference that was to have been published, when Harris immediately went on the attack: religion, he said, was the belief in anything that could not be proved by human reason. End of conversation. Than Geoff decided early on in the interview, he said, that it was absurd to be dragged into that argument.

The subject of prayer came up, along with the question about whether it was based in fear; and remembering that old adage that "there are no atheists in foxholes," I asked Than Geoff what he thought about the human need to turn to some external power or authority in life or death situations, where fear predominates--but another member of our group interjected, without hesitation and with real passion in his voice: "I WAS an antheist in a foxhole." No arguing with a man with that experience behind him. As for atheism, well, we moved on to other topics. A good discussion, though, and I was glad to have raised the issue. I'd be interested to hear responses from readers: Is religion necessary?

Is Religion Necessary?

I woke this morning to find myself trying to formulate a question for Thanissaro Bhikkhu, who leads his monthly session with our sangha this afternoon. Than Geoff, as I persist in calling him--I haven't been able to adjust to the more correct Ajaan Geoff (the abbot, rather than the monk) but nor have others in our group, and frankly it does not seem to concern him--Than Geoff asks first for questions after our hour-long sit, and this issue has been on my mind for some time now. I guess I'd put it as a request or an invitation more than a question, and it would go something like this:

Please talk a little about the threshold between meditation as mind-training practice and meditation as religious practice. At what point, if any, does it become desirable or necessary to step beyond the not-exclusively religious benefits of focus, concentration and mindfulness and into commitment to religion?

I do realize that this question arises from my own deep skepticism about religion. No need, here, to return to that old whine about having it thrust down my throat as a child. That's the emotional part. But I also have an intellectual predisposition toward disbelief. My mind will simply not reach into some imagined realm of continued existence beyond this life. And sadly, perhaps, the concept of an almighty and all-loving God who takes an interest in human affairs seems almost laughable to me in view of the realities of life here on the planet Earth and in the context of so unimaginably vast and unknowable a universe.

And while Buddhism seems to me admirable in not requiring faith in "God," in emphasizing the role of individual responsibility for one's life, and in teaching laudable human values, it leaves me asking myself why it would need to be practiced as a religion.

Was there a threshold of this kind, I want to ask Than Geoff, that you personally had to cross? And, if you did, did it take the form of some "Road to Damascus" moment? Or how did it happen for you?

I wonder if my curiosity derives from looking for such a moment for myself? And if it's the intellect that stands in the way of my ever finding it?

The Local News: It's Murder

Saturday. Over my morning cup of tea, I stumble sleepily into the "California" section of the Los Angeles Times. Front page: a husband and two boys, 7 and 3, murdered--supposedly by their mother in Rowland Heights. Page 3: "2 deny guilt in OC slayings"--a father and daughter killed, allegedly by two men, because they tried to end a relationship between one of the men and another daughter, because the family was Hindu and the suitor a Muslim. Page 7: "Victims are remembered in Burbank: Two apartment complex residents were shot dead Thursday and a third wounded. Then the shooter turned the gun on himself." That's the local news. The first instinct, of course, is to blame the killers. Please instead send metta to these--and all those many other--unhappy and ignorant human beings, who seem to know of no other way to solve their conflicts than to kill their neighbors and their loved ones. Including those who wage war. As our teacher says, the world would be a better place if they could find true happiness and the source of happiness.

And have a good weekend.

Oppression Stories

"May I be free from oppression..."--The Sublime Attitudes

I have been traveling. In my mind, that is. I have been reading novels. They have transported me effortlessly through time and space, and given me hours of out-of-this body experience. It has been a while since I spent so much time in novel-land, and I had almost forgotten what a pleasure it can be. Let me tell you...

... about my trip to pre-World War II Europe with Alan Furst, who writes about the period as though he had lived it (he can't have done: he looks much too young and besides, his website informs us that he was born in Manhattan.) His characters move typically not at the center of historical action, but at the periphery; not primarily in the familiar theaters of war--Germany, France, England--but at the uncomfortable edges, places like Spain and Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria; and they are drawn in by the centrifuge of history into the mass of small intrigues that fuel it. I first learned about Furst from my son--thank you, Jason--and just recently finished the third of the three books I have read, "The Foreign Correspondent," whose central character is an underground Italian journalist, engaged, with a small coterie of associates, in the dangerous work of keeping the flames of freedom safe from the oppression of fascism with the small-circulation Italian newspaper that he covertly writes and edits. It's absorbing to accompany him on his missions through the crowded cafes of Paris, the seedy hotels of Hitler's Berlin, and the oppressive back streets of his Mussolini-dominated homeland. It's Furst's instinctive grasp of the history, of the diverse national identities, of the currents of power and cultural detail that sweep me into the experience of an historical period from whose example we should now, in the present, be learning about the dangers of secrecy and the seizure of civil rights.

I have also made a painful journey into the heart of Afghanistan, courtesy of Khaled Hosseini, whose first book, "Kite Runner," was the gripping tale of a boy growing up in that cauldron of the current Middle Eastern struggle with its own history, and the conflict of its religious and cultural traditions with the modern age. "A Thousand Splendid Suns," Hosseini's second book, follows the dreadful, ever worsening fate of two women through the recent history of Afghanistan--from the quasi-medieval pre-contemporary period to the Soviet occupation and the armed resistance of the mujahadeen, to the expulsion of the Soviets and the arrival of the despicable Taliban, and the eventual rout of the Taliban after jihadist attacks on New York's World Trade Center. Theirs, too, is a story of oppression--by a society traditionally dominated by men, whose sense of honor, entitlement and religion justifies any abuse they choose to visit upon their wives and daughters, from the deprivation of education, to virtual imprisonment, all the way to physical abuse and murder with impunity. The two brave women at the center of this story--one of them from the country, barely educated but innately sensitive and intelligent, the other from the city, secretly educated by an enlightened father--are married to the same monster of a man, to whose abuses one eventually succumbs, while the other barely survives. This, in the context of flying bullets and raining morters, destroyed lives at times near starvation. The reader is relieved, at the end, by a note of hope and the miraculous survival of love--along with the realization that the post 9/11 American intervention in that country was truly an act of liberation, but one from which, tragically, our own country was distracted by the ill-thought invasion of Iraq. To any reader of this book, the notion that the Taliban might be permitted to reestablish power in Afghanistan is an unimaginable nightmare.

Ah, yes. And then Australia, where Richard Flanagan's "The Unknown Terrorist" takes place, in a society depicted in a way that the American reader cannot but make comparisons with our own. Flanagan's Sydney is a city whose denizens are obsessed with materialistic notions of well-being and success, where the media become the willing vehicle for product promotion and the expansion of corporate control, where politicians cynically distort the truth in order to satisfy their egos and consolidate their power, where the police capitulate to the whims of the politicians and the media, where the rich parade their wealth and the poor descend into despair, prostitution, drug and alcohol abuse, and degradation. Against this backdrop, the book's main character and focus, the Doll, a pole dancer in a strip joint, falls victim to lies, calumny and innuendo in a momentary bout of civic hysteria about a supposed terrorist plot (non-existent, as we eventually discover) to attack the city. We follow her as she becomes, innocently, more and more deeply entangled in the twisted schemes of evil men who claim to have the interests of the homeland at heart, and accompany her in a tragic descent into a finally inescapable destiny.

"The Unknown Terrorist" is a compelling read--one of those books you want to read at a single sitting--and one that offers a terrifying picture of the current state of the world, dominated as we are by genuine fear and pumped-up paranoia, and where we all too willingly surrender our rights--along with our good sense--to the hysteria of the moment. Fear itself, readily exploited by those hungry for wealth and power, is the oppressor; and the book is a timely reminder of our need to remain conscious and alert to the ever-present danger of being swallowed up in the nightmare.

As a part of my daily meditation practice, I include that wish from the Sublime Attitudes: May I be free from oppression... May all living beings be free from oppression. These three books make that wish all the more urgent, all the more needed, all the more real.

The Buddha Diaries Recommends

Dharma Bums
The Buddha Diaries is offering a free "virtual" stay for all of our readers, at the magically ordinary Washington State country home of Robin and Roger, authors of Dharma Bums. To redeem your prize, simply click here…read the posts, take in the pictures and stories, and be transported.

Having become rather attached to the Dharma Bums’ lovingly portrayed corner of the world, we are anxious (though perhaps not as anxious as they) about their impending departure to places unknown.

The current house and its surroundings, you see, is as much a part of Dharma Bums as the authors themselves. Perhaps more. Roger and Robin’s wonderful observations on Buddhism, current events, nature and philosophy are nearly always sprung from the everyday minutiae of daily life on and around their beautiful property…we cannot imagine any family to be more intimately familiar with their habitat. In this July post, “the incongruity of seeing deer at an extreme minus tide…” leads to ruminations about the elusiveness of outrage, which seems to be an ever-present challenge for this pair. The idyllic scenes unraveling all around them threaten to obfuscate the current political realities that they find so abhorrent.

Thankfully, the posts at Dharma Bums are as well tended to as the prolific garden, which regular readers know intimately by now. There is much else to love about the world (the life) Robin and Andrea share with us: the charming and often educational non sequitur (“The new hi-tech way to spread bark mulch is to have it blown in.”); the surprisingly frequent animal rescue (see chipmunk trapped in garden hose caddy); the carefully chosen photographs that always illuminate or amuse (see photo of a sea star with 19 arms that does both!).

The great danger of the internet is that its pull becomes so strong as to isolate us from each other even as it brings us -- in some ways -- closer together. Dharma Bums removes the double edge from that sword. In bringing loving, honest attention to a small corner of the world that many of us will never see, it strengthens the notion that we are all connected though we may be far apart and living under quite different circumstances.

Please do take a look.

Air Strikes

I was planning to keep quiet today, but I couldn't help myself. I suppose it must make some kind of military sense, but when American warplanes zoom in and wipe out dozens of civilian lives (NY Times, today, about Afghanistan, page 1, Baghdad, page 3) I suspect it's viewed as a cowardly way to wage war by the family and friends of those who die; not to mention thousands of their fellow citizens and millions of Muslims worldwide.

****s (Four-Letter Words)

Another taboo that D. H. Lawrence challenged in "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was, of course, the use of those four-letter words. They were still able to cause shock waves in society when they led to the frequent arrests and indictments of the comedian Lenny Bruce in the 1950s and 1960s. His famous outloud public listing of them in defiance of his persecutors might mark the moment of their liberation from the constraints that had persisted in conventionally banning them from public discourse.

Today they are as common as pebbles on the beach. You overhear them used in causal conversations in cafes and restaurants. You hear them liberally uttered in movies and on television--at least on channels freed from the controls of those government censors, who still seek to protect the young and innocent from words they hear every day on the streets and in their schools. For the same reason, I suppose, you do not read them in newspapers. The New York Times still boasts that it provides all the news that's fit to print--presumably in appropriately fit language. The family values folks are still that powerful.

But the real news is quite different: words, friends, have escaped their caged and run amok in our society. No matter how we try to put them back, there are too many of them for us to control.

The four-letter words are the names of body parts and body functions. They are good solid words with noble histories. Fuck, piss, shit, cock, cunt... I'm forgetting a couple here, I know. Lawrence, I think, wanted simply to recognize them honestly as words, and rehabilitate them from the bleak, moralistic dungeon into which they had been thrown by those seeking to denigrate the human body and its natural acts as shame- and sinful. Along with the natural beauty and joy of the body we are given to inhabit, he wanted to restore words to their original authenticity and power.

There are, certainly, those who continue to dishonor words by their misuse and abuse. The sad part is that we unconsciously perpetuate precisely that secret shame that Lawrence wanted to unmask by using these noble words in contexts that are disconnected from their meaning. I myself am guilty of those expletives. When I say, casually, Oh, shit! I am not referring to the function that depletes my body of unneeded waste. When I explode, as I am known to do, in traffic, and call someone a "fucking idiot," I am not evoking his skills between the sheets.

And then there are the derivatives--the -mothers and the -suckers--whose common use has different implications. Some might suggest that it has deep undertones of a homophobia and an Oedipal neurosis that say much about our society.

The Buddhist teaching of "Right Speech" is a useful guidepost here. I'm for honest language, language freed from artificial restraints--but also for the use of language that does not egregiously harm or hurt. I have been thinking recently, in this context, of writing about those racial epithets that arouse such controversy... but that's for another entry. As a lover of language, I embrace words in all their manifestations and all their multiple meanings. Expletives have their place, especially when they help us to let off steam. But I do prefer the intentional and conscious use of language over the casual, imprecise variety. I prefer, in the immortal words of Dr. Seuss, to "say what I mean and mean what I say."

Sex... and The Buddha Gets a Face Job

Okay, let's talk about sex. Ready, everyone? I'm trusting you to get back to me on this one... We went to see "Lady Chatterley" last night--the new French film based on the second version of D. H. Lawrence's novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover"--the one that's entitled "John Thomas and Lady Jane." John Thomas, for those unfamiliar with English idiom (that's English English) was in my young day--and perhaps still is--a common euphemism for the penis. Lady Jane...? Well, I never heard it used that way, but I'm sure Lawrence had a wry smile when he thought up the title. As I recall, he wrote the second and third versions because he was not wholly satisfied with the first: he wanted it to be less coy, more frank, more explicit than he had originally allowed himself. (Remember, he had been in trouble with the obscenity police already in the past.) This time, I'm guessing, he wanted to get it right, no matter what the morality brigade might say.

The film? Delightful. Erotic. Sensual. It's slightly odd, I'll confess, to see this French take on the English landscape, the English social structure, English mores. The landscape is beautiful, and captured with loving attention to detail. Those who saw Andy Goldsworthy's "Rivers and Tides" might have some sense of the quality of "nature as art" that we get in the long shots of green landscapes with rolling hills and thick forests of trees, or the close-ups of ferns, wildflowers, grasses... It's breathtaking and all, somehow, so quintessentially English. I could smell the moldering leaves and the rotting wood along the pathways through the woods, and feel them underfoot. The simple close-up of a prickly sweet chestnut casing, fallen from its branch, was enough to awaken long dormant memories of childhood. Delicious.

And the sex? No, I hadn't forgotten it. In fact, I think I've just been talking about it, because in this movie sex and nature are inseparable. The sex is earthy, a bit clumsy, real. The film--remarkably, considering its origin--captures something crucial about the English character, the surface reticence beneath which, often, despite stereotypes to the contrary, a real passion burns. Connie (Lady Chatterley) and Barkin share little in common but for these characteristics. Thanks to the reticence, their sexuality is slow to awaken, and when it does (a great scene, with a baby chick, passed from his hand to hers) it burns slow and awkward to begin with. Clothes, even, are not readily shed--and then not until well into the relationship; which does not mean that the scenes are not infectiously erotic. And once awakened, the sex runs deep and steamy on both sides, and it is shown as good, healthy, human and, let's say it, not a little animal. It is, notably, about both man and woman. It does not take sides.

I'm not sure that the film fully captures the full depth of the social taboos that are violated by Lawrence's novel, though it certainly tries. This is, after all, early twentieth century England, with Victorianism at least very present in the rear view mirror. She is, after all, a "Lady," and he a gamekeeper, a man of the lower orders, a servant to her husband, rude in appearance and in manner (both captured in great performances, by the way.) Her mansion, with its sweeping stairways, its elegant furniture, its ancestral portraits, is amply contrasted with his humble cottage and the shack where they meet, its walls and shelves lined with common tools and utensils--all filmed with equal love of their sheer physicality. It might seem that the affair is somehow more, well, permissible than then current social mores would have allowed: there is little sense of the risk involved for both parties, of the enormity of their action. But that, perhaps, is Lawrence, because he insists on the rightness of it--the rightness of sex as well as the rightness of flouting those old, artificial social barriers that stoof between human beings.

Okay, you may have gathered by now that I enjoyed this film. But what about the moral questions about obscenity that so riled critics--both literary and social--when the book appeared? In view of the pornography that is available at the tough of a few buttons on your home computer these days, the eroticism of "Lady Chatterley," while less explicit, seems to me in some ways more potent than the debased images of human flesh so liberally exposed to the voyeuristic eye. I think it's clear by now that the healthy, human sexuality for which Lawrence made his pitch is regarded by most thinking people as just that: human, and healthy. Would today's morals brigades work up a lather over "Lady Chatterley"? Not, perhaps, when they have so much juicier and more broadly available targets.

Which brings us to the interesting question as to whether obscenity is harmful. Are there still boundaries that should not be crossed, or that are crossed at the cost of damage to the social fabric? Is it anybody's business what I choose to watch, or read? What I have learned about Buddhist teachings in this regard is that the practice of sex is reprehensible only by the standard of potential harm--harm to myself, or harm to other people. So then I have to wonder what is harmful. Rape, clearly, at one extreme, no question there. But how about, um, dare I raise the subject... masturbation? Harmful? I guess if you still believe that it causes acne--or blindness. Seriously, though, to whom? To anyone who indulges in the practice? To those who become addicted? Food for thought. I guess we must all make these intimate judgments for ourselves.

And what about pornography? Is it harmful to those who produce the stuff? To those who watch it? On what basis do we condemn it, if we choose to do so?

Anyway, interesting questions, no? I'd be happy to hear your thoughts...

Oh, yes. I had to take a scrubbing brush to the Buddha yesterday. Our fountain, that is. And a toothbrush, for the nooks and crannies around the mouth and eyes, and especially the traditional curlicues of hair. At least, I'm assuming that those stylized curls are intended to represent the hair. Anyway, over the months, our Buddha had acquired a patina of greenish algae, and it was time for him to get spruced up. It did feel a bit funny, working away at him like that, but he looks a whole lot better for the cleaning.