Le Tour: Suffering

It's a word that's constantly on the lips of every rider interviewed, every coach and trainer, every commentator on the television coverage. Suffering. It's hard to imagine how much suffering those men incur for twenty-one days on their high-tech machines, riding often over one hundred miles a day, and up mountainsides, day after day, any one of which would challenge the strength of most powerful of men on a single day. They must have been grateful, yesterday, to reach the finish line on the Champs-Elysees in Paris. The Spanish rider who won the race, Carlos Sastre, credited a former team manager for having "taught me to suffer."



All of which led me to wonder what the Buddha might have to say about the Tour de France. He didn't own a bicycle, of course--though I enjoy the image of the Buddha on a bike. He walked. He walked great distances, accompanied by his closest disciples, I suppose with many stops along the way to teach what he had learned. Walking such distances may have caused discomfort--the occasional blister, surely, and sore muscles in the legs--but nothing like the suffering incurred by choice in competitive sports events like the tour.

We suffer enough in our daily lives. Is it "right effort" to incur more suffering by choice? Or is it mere human vanity? No doubt but that it's a discipline requiring incredible focus and concentration--perhaps even an extreme form of meditation, and certainly an extreme test of the stuff we human beings are made of. The slightest weakness is laid bare, the slightest vulnerability exploited by the competition. There's no room for self-pity, no room for distraction, no room for excuses.

The Buddha himself completed a marathon of a kind, in the course of those years of ascetic wandering, when he was reputed to have survived on nothing but a grain of rice a day. (An irreverent aside: I've often wondered how that grain was prepared. He can't have eat it uncooked, can he?) His conclusion was that this form of self-inflicted torture was unnecessary to achieve the goal of happiness. It was not necessary, he discovered, to intensify the suffering in order to find the way to end it. On the contrary, suffering is intensified by what we add to it to satisfy our ego-driven needs.

Egos abound, of course, in an event like the Tour de France. It's a daily battle to win--to win the sprint, to win the stage, to win the daily awarded jerseys: white for the best young rider, green for the best sprinter, polka-dotted for the best climber, and the famous yellow for the overall Tour leader. The competition is intense, and it's easy to get hooked on it--as I have been, this year, for the umpteenth time. Team strategy and individual performance are intertwined in plots and patterns that get more complex by the day. Wild surprises and bitter disappointments alternate to compel attention and wrench the emotional response.

Hardly a Middle Way, then. Strangely, though, it's Buddhist values like concentration and persistence--and of course equanimity in the face of suffering--that pay off in the Tour as in any other challenge that life offers. Depending on how you look at it, it's all a teaching.

Warriors

I notice that I have been writing more about art than about the Buddha and his teachings in recent days. It's an old habit, and I'm glad to be finding the opportunities; and besides, I see little conflict between the two. After all, art at its best, is about the life of mind and spirit, about the inner work it takes to come to the kind of clear-sighted self-knowledge that the practice of Buddhism invites. I trust that my reflections are of interest to visitors to The Buddha Diaries, because your visits are important to me. For me--as I'm sure for others--it's of essence that what I write be read. It's not my wish to be that "voice crying in the wilderness." As I tried to clarify in that recent lecture, "Going Deep: Mining the Inner Self," I write in part to find out more about myself, and in part in order to be heard by others.

Back to art, then. Thursday this past week we went with our friends Fred and Lynn to see "Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China's First Emperor" at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana--the exhibition's first stop on a North American tour. I have known about these figures for some time, of course, and was excited at the prospect of seeing them at first hand. What I had in mind--somewhat naively, I suppose--were those serried ranks of foot soldiers and cavalrymen I had seen in photographic reproduction, and I have to say that what I got was something different from my expectations. No less valuable in its way, perhaps, but different.

What I got was a great deal of historical and cultural information about China at the time of the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang (250-210 B.C.) and a lot of fascinating information about the creation of those figures, their re-discovery centuries later, and the archeological restoration process that it took to bring them back to something close to their original splendor. What I missed was what I can only describe as the oomph I had expected, the spectacular quality of the sheer mass of them, the "serried ranks" I mentioned above. The relatively small number of restored figures were exhibited separately, as individuals--marvels in themselves but deprived of their collective grandeur. I got a lot less awe than would have met my expectations, and had to satisfy that desire through the photographs and video that accompanied the show.

(Thanks to the Bowers Museum for providing me with these images. I should point out, however, that they are not installation shots from the current exhibition, but rather from the Museum of the Terra Cotta Warriors and Horses at Qin Shi Huang, Lintong, China.)



That said, I did learn a lot; and I was awed, in a minor key, by the marvelously skillful construction and the quiet serenity of the isolated figures. It's amazing, given their numbers, that each is an individual, with individual physiognomy and posture, each with an individual energy and emotional affect. No two, as I understand it, are identical. In their centuries-old silence, they exude an inner strength and purposefulness that is, yes, awesome in itself. They stand before us, somehow above the vicissitudes of the current history of the world, secure in their deathless certitude and improbable survival.

What is it, I wonder, about we humans that we have been so obsessed, throughout our history, with making images of ourselves? There was a practical/spiritual purpose, of course, to the creation of this terra cotta army: the emperor needed their protection in the afterlife. Installed at strategic locations at the outskirts of his necropolis, they have stood guard for centuries, in defense of his eternal soul. Well, not quite. The non-romantic, Buddhist part of me needs to point out that this army, too, fell victim to the ravages of time, and was utterly destroyed before modern man came along to meticulously recreate it. Dust to dust... and back again!

Still, we turn our human skills to the attempt to perpetuate who we are, and it is certainly moving, amongst these figures dignified by age, to feel that we are in some small way in touch with those who walked the earth so many years before us; and that their spirit can still in some small way walk amongst us. I value enormously the small statue of the Buddha that sits in eternal contemplation in our garden, where I sit writing these words on a sunny Saturday morning in twenty-first century Southern California; and the larger face of the Buddha, down whose cheeks the water of our fountain runs like ever-compassionate tears for the suffering we bring upon ourselves through our attachments. These figures are true presences in our lives, reminders of the values that we try to live by. I know they are not the Buddha, that they do not remotely "look like" what the Buddha may have done, twenty-five hundred years ago; and even so they bring something of his serenity of spirit into the garden, along with a healthy reminder of the impermanence of all things.

As for the warriors, eternally stalwart and eternally loyal to their emperor, they too bring something of value into our lives, reminding us in their wordless way of the deepest fears and grandest aspirations that we share with our fellow mortal beings throughout history, and in all parts of the globe.

In Our Garden...

... the roses thrive on the sunlight, despite the heat...





... the eucalyptus sheds its skin--and leaves!--and scatters them everywhere. What a chore!


(Click on this one, for full flavor!)

The agapanthus bloom, creating an ethereal blue carpet on the shoulders of their emerald green leaves and tall, graceful stems...





... the sassy morning glory wants to strangle everything with its clinging vines...





... and the Buddha sits serene as ever, with a fuschia in his lap.



All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

It's Wednesday... Blessings, everyone.

The Buddha--A Disturbing Image

It's a good thing that Buddhists aren't Muslims, at least not those of the fundamentalist variety. Otherwise the giant Buddha images by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami in his current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles would provoke a world-wide conflagration of outrage. (You'll have to check on the MOCA site for images of the Buddhas, but it's worth the time and effort to view and listen to Murakami's tour.)

But more of the Buddhas shortly. First, be it said that if you wish to see a relentlessly sly, subversive--yet savage--assault on the skewed values of contemporary civilization, you need look no further than this show. Murakami outWarhols Warhol in this plethora of work where kitsch meets high fashion meets Madison Avenue marketing meets, um… art. Included in the installation is a complete high-end Louis Vuitton store where fashion accessories may be purchased for barely mentionable sums of money. When we were there, my wife spotted a young woman cheerfully charge $1,000 and significant change on one of the knick-knacks on sale there.

Murakami skewers--and profits from!--not only the high end market, however. Included in the show are dozens of the tiny, cheaply manufactured and cutely bizarre toy figures he produced to be marketed with candy and ice cream—goods as toxic, in their way, as the cigarettes with which baseball cards were once mass-distributed. His high-gloss, psychedelic adumbrations of the human form, ranging all the way from miniature to monumental, combine the terminally cute with the hideously grotesque, sci-fi anime with fairy tale, the child's innocence with the overtly obscene. Garish in color and material, their shapes blend the streamlined finish of the automobile with the sensual rotundity of the egg—or the baby’s bottom, or the mushroom, both frequent icons in this work!—with the harsh, sharp edge of weaponry or mechanics.

His subversion of the post-Romantic, modernist view of the art object as unique, original, disengaged, and isolated in its own aesthetic bubble of perfection could not be more complete or dismissive. His "superflat" paintings, for God's sake, not only "go with" the wallpaper; they match it! Or they reduce the imagery to a single, cartoonish character or line,



a huge, grinning, devastatingly altered Mickey Mouse face, for example, or a branching lightning bolt. He is not above regaling his viewers with a million of those cheap and pretty flower shapes

and simple, repetitive patterns of all kinds. His mushrooms are rendered with the simplistic cheeriness of those you see on the nursery wall, with colorful dots and friendly, bulbous stalks. Every tawdry, cliché’d graphic device is grist for his tireless mill.

A further strategy of subversion is infantilism. The child-like cartoon characters, recurring everywhere in this work, from painting to sculpture to video, are the counterparts of those in the typical Disney film;



indeed the entire installation is a kind of nightmare Disneyland, where cuteness reigns supreme in a kind of extravagant cultural gesture of denial of the grim geopolitical realities that face us in an increasingly at-risk world. It’s no accident that those nursery mushrooms remind us tauntingly of the clouds above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the innocence of Murakami’s little people covers for something quite different beneath the benign appearances, and much closer to the surface than is the case with those cute Disney dwarfs and monsters.

Which brings us back to those Buddhas, two of them, towering assemblages of multiple parts on a base, in each case, of the traditional lotus plant. In the most recent, “Oval Buddha,” 2007, the figure of the Buddha sits atop a huge turtle and a tall pedestal encrusted with a profusion of rococo detail. (Tour #6 on the link above will give you a view of this Buddha, and a partial glimpse of the other.) Gone, though, is the traditional pleasing serenity of the Buddha’s smile, replaced here by two faces, one on each side of the head—the first an angry scowl, the other a devouring grimace with ferocious teeth. Murakami’s subversion, it seems, extends from the physical to the spiritual realm, in a world where suffering is omnipresent beneath the mask of material well-being. It’s a deeply disturbing vision, but one that should compel our attention and demand a reconsideration of many of our treasured assumptions about ourselves, our human nature, as well as about our spiritual aspirations and pretensions.

On Privilege and Suffering

Thanks to those who responded to my "mea culpa" yesterday. Thailandchani raised this troubling question: "Can someone from an obviously privileged background ever come to really understand suffering?" To which she added, "Buddha left privilege behind for enlightenment." Troubling to me, obviously, because I happen to enjoy enormous privileges: by birth, by education, by social situation--by virtually any standard you care to apply. When I look around the world and see the immense suffering everywhere--from hunger, disease, oppression, warfare, poverty--it's hard to resist those feelings of guilt that privilege brings with it.

I happened to pick up a copy of a book by the Dalai Lama yesterday, at our local Target store, of all places, where Ellie and I had gone to find some stocking stuffers and cute clothes for our grandchildren in England. The book is called "How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life," and on the very first page His Holiness has this to say on the topic in question:

Material advancement alone sometimes solves one problem but creates another. For example, certain people may have acquired wealth, a good education, and high social standing, yet happiness eludes them. They take sleeping pills and drink too much alcohol. Something is missing, something still not satisfied, so these people take refuge in drugs or in a bottle. On the other hand, some people who have less money to worry about enjoy more peace. They sleep well at night. Despite being poor in a material sense, they are content and happy. This shows the impact of a good mental attitude. Material development alone will not fully resolve the problem of humanity's suffering.

And even the Buddha, as I recall, discovered after years of exposing himself to poverty and hunger as a mendicant and ascetic that deprivation brought no more release from suffering than did the life of luxury he had led before.

To return to Chani's question, then, I have to say that the answer is No. To me, with all my privileges, the suffering of a great part of humanity is unimaginable. There's no way I can "understand" it. Even though it exists, certainly, in my own back yard, it's oceans away, so vast as to be incomprehensible. Should I, like the Buddha, turn my back on the life that has been granted me, for better or for worse? There's a nagging part of me--the conscience?--that keeps telling me I should, even while I recognize that it's neither reasonable nor realistic, nor that such a gesture would even do very much to help.

On the other hand, as the Dalai Lama suggests, none of us escape the inevitability of suffering. Are the wealthy in their mansions with their drugs and bottles suffering any less than those out on the street, with theirs? Certainly, they are suffering in circumstances of greater material comfort--but how much does that help, when suffering happens in the heart and soul?

And then that voice kicks in again to tell me that I'm rationalizing...

I come back to the need to remain conscious, to accept responsibility for everything that privilege has brought to me, and to practice proportionate generosity. I'd be interested in your views.

photo credit

A Buddha Garden

Writing yesterday about my visit to the Claremont Graduate School and my talk with art students there, I omitted mention of one notable exhibition in a neighboring gallery. Created by a visiting Chinese student, Li Wan, it should not be forgotten in this Buddhist blog, since it was profoundly Buddhist in imagery and intention.

An installation that occupied the entire space of the high-ceilinged gallery, it combined a variety of media to create an interior "Buddhist garden." Strewn everywhere on the gallery floor were dozens of artificial lily pads and pink lotus blossoms. The hump of a small, oriental bridge with neat white railings completed the illusion that the entire gallery floor had been transformed into a lake and that the viewer was, in some sense, "walking on water." Suspended from the ceiling, long, transparent plastic films, etched their full length with repeated images of the Buddha, created towering columns--one circular, one triangular in shape, and one forming a tall, narrow temple which invited the viewer's entry and passage through it. Mural-sized drawings of the Buddha, three or four times human scale and beautifully executed, dominated three of the four gallery walls, adding to the quiet, temple-like effect of the whole installation.

Walking in this bright, gallery-lit space, the viewer is startled when the all the lights suddenly snap off, according to some pre-timed program, leaving us in complete darkness but for the eerie, luminous glow of certain elements of the work--those Buddha images on the walls of film, the white of the bridge--that were treated, apparently, with some glow-in-the-dark material that lingers on after the lights shut off.

It's a magical effect, and one that fills us with a sense of delighted wonder as we stop in the darkness and peer around into the surrounding stillness. An island of serenity and an invitation into the silence of meditative contemplation, Li Wan's space is a remarkably ambitious achievement for a student show, and deserves to be offered to a wider audience. I hope that he will find other venues to install the same work in the future.

Opera: Grand and Soapy

Last night, Saturday, Ellie and I indulged in an evening of arias from grand opera at the Laguna Beach "Pageant of the Masters" outdoor amphitheater. The night before, Friday, we had watched the first episode of "Tell Me You Love Me," the new drama series on HBO television. Same theme: sex. Different eras, different media, different modes...

It was good to be out under the stars with friends and community. A good audience, a good crowd. It was good to feel cool, cold, even, as the evening lengthened, after the summer heat waves, which have seemed especially oppressive this year. It was good to be in the post-tourist season. And good to be regaled with the awesome reaches of the human voice, and share in the awesome range of human emotion. Passion is a rare quality in that it embraces the extremes of light and dark, the heights of ecstasy and the depths of grief. It's the human soul's most extravagant expression of the most basic of all drives (with the possible exception of material sustenance): human sexuality.

Because what else is this bloviating all about? Desire, possession, rejection, despair. Expressed in the close-to-heavenly sounds of operatic aria, it does--to use the word my friend used after the performance--"transport." It takes us to a place where feeling is untrammelled by the wonderfully absurd, inherent clumsiness of the mating of two human beings, or by the inadequacies of language. The soul soars in response to the voices, and in response to the ancient music of desire within ourselves. The aria gives us that "tune beyond us, yet ourselves" of which Wallace Stevens wrote in "The Man with the Blue Guitar."

Ah, yes. But I found myself missing some important part of the grandeur of grand opera, in an evening of arias strung together for no other purpose than the aesthetic one. I missed the grand scenes, the outrageous narrative, the over-the-top staging. I'm honestly no great opera buff, and my knowledge of opera music is limited at best. Those moments when I have most enjoyed it have been those when I am swept up in the story-line, "operatic" though it may be, and overwhelmed by the sheer theatricality of it all. The songs are, well, a part of it. The company, last night, did what they could to make up for this missing context with glorious costumes, lighting, rudimentary sets--but I confess I became just a wee bit bored. The songs were not enough, for me, in themselves, strung together like glittering beads on a necklace. And I noticed, not for the first time, about myself, that my sensibility responds more to words and narrative form than it does to music. Still, a truly lovely evening.

"Tell Me You Love Me," by contrast, was almost the dead opposite. Sex without the splendor, and without the arias. Sex, in a word, as most of us come to know it, the grubbier, more insecurity-fraught business of getting our needs met and trying at the same time to meet our partner's. That, and dodging the mines and booby traps of tolerable relationship. As such, this drama--well, this soap "opera"--comes as close as you can get to a reality show. For good reason, surely: the ratings. (My guess--confirmed by a quick Google on the side--is that the term "soap opera" derives from its need to literally sell soap.)

Of its genre, though, I'd have to say that the first episode of "Tell Me You Love Me" was very good. Very good indeed. The drama follows three couples at different stages of relationship: the young, the "passionate," the not-yet-married, simply ravenous for the immediate satisfaction of mutual physical invasion; the older, as yet childless couple struggling with infertility--hers? his?--and the transformation of sex into a different, more clinical-technological process, with potentially disastrous effects on the pleasures involved; and the third, more advanced, with young children whose presence makes such demands on the resources of time, affection, and sheer physical capacity that the sexual drive gets shoved aside or satisfied in moments of solitary, joyless desperation. (A masturbation scene, extraordinarily well done...)

The strong point here is that no one is to blame. No good guys, no bad guys. The couples clearly love each other. They just manage to mess things up, as the rest of us do, in the daily balancing act between love and its ultimate physical manifestation, sex. And the sex, like the love, is problematic--though the protagonists insist (don't we all?) that everything in the bedroom is just "fine." They are more apt to fake a sense of satisfaction than to admit to anything more damaging to the ever-vulnerable ego. The drama works well, too, in its frank depictions of sexual acts, which are real, explicit, not coy, a little clumsy (the word comes back: is this just me??!!) always caught somewhere between the sublime and the absurd and, as sex tends to be, sometimes blissful, erotic, sometimes simply mundane.

Well, you may have guessed that I enjoyed this show immensely. I intend to come back to it this very evening, for the next episode. You might say I'm hooked. Next I'll have to figure out what all this has to do with the Buddha.

Happy Sunday, everyone. What's left of it...

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.

Sacrilege? Desecration? The Buddha Smiles

I’m not easily incensed by the abuse of religious symbols, honestly, but this picture on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times and the article it illustrates did give me pause. The “Tao” restaurant, in Las Vegas? With a 20’ golden Buddha? Where well-heeled diners feast themselves silly at enormous cost, their excess no doubt allayed by the surrounding pictures of monks and holy men? And votive candles? I wonder, too, what my Taoist friend would think about this appropriation of the Tao? Carly?

Anyway, here’s a part of what the article decribes:

“There is the 20-foot golden Buddha, and enough velvet and silk swathing 60,000 square feet to evoke an Old West bordello. Ever-thumping music pumps in the dining room and two levels above, sending the stylish and scantily clad to the dance floor.

"This is Tao Las Vegas, the highest grossing independent restaurant in the United States, according to Restaurants & Institutions magazine, which for 24 years has been ranking the top 100. In 2006, its first full year open, Tao did $55.2 million in business, or $16 million more than its closest competitor… Its average dinner check was $70, and 50 percent of its revenues came from alcohol…

"Much like a factory, Tao wants to squeeze revenue from every square foot of its plant as close to 24 hours a day, seven days a week as possible.

"Come nightfall… the fire columns burn in the desert air, the DJs take their place in the booth [at the companion Tao Beach Club] and Tao Beach becomes a rooftop nightclub. The club’s Opium Room… is rented out for corporate or private events from 5 p.m. until 10 p.m., when it transforms back into another level of the nightclub.

"Even then the hard-sell does not stop for Tao Las Vegas. They hope their patrons stop by the gift shop and take home a bronze Buddha head ($39) or a mango-scented pillar candle ($20)."

And this “bordello” is presided over by the Buddha, swathed in gold? Would they have dared to do the same with Jesus? And his disciples? With, um, Mohammed? I think not. What is it about the Buddha that makes his image so, well, hip and trendy? Is he perceived as somehow all-permissive, in a society that desperately seeks to justify its greed, or at least to disguise it in denial? Is it something to do with the comfortable belly with which he has come to be represented? The benign smile?

I can’t help but wonder what the Buddha himself might have had to say about this sorry story. Not one to judge, he would I suppose have simply grieved for the endless, unknowing, unconscious harm we bring upon ourselves, and looked with his usual beneficent smile upon our world of conspicuous consumption, from the depths of his bottomless compassion. I meant to bring the subject up last night in our sangha, while Thanissaro Bhikkku was on hand, with all his wisdom... But Ellie was not feeling well and stayed home, and I left the group early...

By the way, full disclosure: I can’t exculpate myself too easily from my own complicity. Saturday night, Ellie and I went out with friends to a similarly overpriced restaurant here in Orange County, California, in an environment no less gaudy. Indeed, the first word that came to mind as we approached the distinctly rococo bar was one we all agreed on: “bordello”! We overindulged, I regret to have to confess.

Still, no Buddhas. So far as I could tell.