Dharma Monkey

I’ve been a fan of Bill Maher for a long time: he brings a well-reasoned voice to discussions of politics, pop culture and world events, using biting humor as an equal-opportunity offender to make his points.  I agree with his position on many issues, including marriage equality, the decriminalization of certain drugs, the sometimes-absurdity of political correctness and the inappropriate role of religion (organized and otherwise) in American politics.  I’ve seen him live and on television, and squirmed uncomfortably at times during his movie Religulous in the theater.

Simply put, the guy is dang funny…except for this week.

In the popular “New Rules” segment at the end of his Friday night show, he mounted a senseless tirade against Buddhism, all because Tiger Woods’ Feb. 19 mea culpa speech referenced the fact that the golf legend was raised Buddhist, and that Woods would now return to the Buddhist path as part of his recovery.  Here’s the part of Tiger’s speech that sent the Real Time host into an angry tailspin:

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

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, in Bill Maher’s eyes, a celebrity either hiding behind or wrapping himself in religion after a scandal would be, in a world, scandalous.  But rarely have I seen the man get so angry, and spew so much venom toward organized religion.  But to then go on to personally attack Gautama Buddha as a man and teacher, and his teachings on the origins of suffering?  I guess I would have thought that Bill Maher was smart enough to realize, even in the abstract, where Buddhist thought comes from.

[Read the full transcript of his "New Rule" here, via Huffington Post.  He demonstrates that Buddhism really isn't his cup of tea: "Craving for things outside ourselves is what makes life life - I don't want to learn to not want, that's what people in prison have to do."]

Even so, the fact that I’m still thinking about this — that I’m still smarting from Bill Maher’s vilification of Buddhism — leaves me to wonder what I’m missing.  When he railed against Sarah Palin’s certainty that her candidacy for vice president was part of “God’s plan,” I laughed right along with him.  Yet when he poked fun at tourists and a man playing Jesus at Orlando’s Holy Land Experience in his movie Religulous, I groaned aloud in discomfort.

The discussion of religion in public life, especially in today’s America, is never easy, as few issues are as divisive.  I have as much right to believe in Buddha’s teachings, as off-base as they may seem to some, as Jehovah Witnesses have the right to believe that they are the only ones who can survive the Abrahamic Armageddon.  And Bill Maher has the right to what he believes, too.

Many years ago, I remember feeling terribly uncomfortable when visiting my dad’s Southern Baptist church and hearing the minister and Sunday School teachers say that Roman Catholicism was a statue-worshiping cult made up of people who prayed to spirits rather than reserving all of their devotion for Jesus.  And now, perhaps I’ve grown accustomed to the low profile Buddhism maintains with militant atheists and the like, but it is still uncomfortable when my personal beliefs are attacked.  The same certainly holds true for anyone on a spiritual or religious path.

I still respect Bill Maher for his intelligence, his ability to use persuasive reason, and the fact that he’s irreverently funny.  I realize his red-in-the-face form of atheism is part of his shtick.   But sometimes, it really isn’t that funny — and I know I’m not the only one who thinks so.

February 28th, 2010 | Category: Buddhism, Pop Culture | Comments (2)

A situation recently came up at work — a decision was made, and I didn’t think it was a good one. I stewed over the issue for a day or so, and after an intense couple of hours, as I tried to figure out the best approach for dealing with the way the situation had manifested itself in my mind, a word popped into my head: pag-yü.

Pag-yü is the title of the fourth chapter of Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatāra, the Way to the Bodhisattva. I’ve seen this word translated as attentiveness, carefulness, awareness or conscientiousness. The pag-yü chapter, as I read it, is a how-to guide for dealing with afflictive emotions, or kleshas, that starts with a stern warning to the practitioner to develop an emotional awareness that is keen enough to burn away lifetimes of habitual behavior. It’s a deep-rooted pattern of situational experience and emotional reaction that, in most cases, has us beat from the very beginning.

It is I who welcome them within my heart,
Allowing them to harm me at their pleasure.
I who suffer all without resentment –
Thus my abject patience, all displaced…
And yet, the mighty fiend of my afflictions,
Flings me in an instant headlong down
To where the mighty lord of mountains
Would be burned, its very ashes all consumed.
No other enemy indeed
Has lived so long as my defiled emotions –
O, my enemy, afflictive passion,
Endless and beginningless companion!
Pag-yü 4, 29 and 31-32

In his commentary on the Bodhicaryavatāra, For the Benefit of All Beings, His Holiness the Dalai Lama echoes the poet’s sentiment, noting, “Those whom we ordinarily consider to be our enemies can only be so for one lifetime, at the most. But negative emotions have been harming us from time without beginning. They are truly the worst of enemies.”

So how to break the ingrained, habitual stranglehold that afflictive emotions have on us? As I walked to the office one morning, the work situation still churning in my mind, I thought of this concept of awareness, pag-yü, and I asked myself the simplest of questions: where do these feelings I have about this specific work situation come from? In other words, why do I feel this way?

That split-second pause from letting my brain baste in an self-concocted emotional stew was all it took. A single, brief moment of attention, and I had the answer. In this case, as in so many others, the matter boiled down to ego (the workplace is the perfect breeding ground for ego, as I’ve written in the past).

A couple days ago when I started reading the Bodhicaryavatāra, I hoped that something — even a single stanza — might jump out to help me in my day-to-day life. Yet in this instance, it was the title of a chapter that helped remind me of the wisdom that I so desperately seek. A moment of awareness, plain and simple, was exactly what I needed.

February 10th, 2010 | Category: Buddhism, Mindfulness, Professional, Spirituality | Leave a comment

So much about the spiritual journey is about finding things:  words like “discovery,” “exploration” and “searching” seem to underscore the notion that the “path” (another one of those expedition words) is either a quest to uncover a hidden wisdom or a difficult odyssey to a recondite destination. Certainly most of the New Ageism that surrounds us in popular culture is about unlocking this or unearthing that.

I am reminded tonight, however, that my own journey should be about creation, and specifically about creating peace. In his column in this month’s Shambhala Sun, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche writes about our individual obligation to develop a meditative discipline in order to become a peacemaker.

As human beings, we are influenced by our environment. If we create an environment of aggression and disharmony, stress will become the norm. Conversely, if we create an environment of kindness, love, discipline, and generosity, we will all begin to feel a sense of peace.

One characteristic of this dark age is that we doubt our innate goodness. We look outside ourselves for fulfillment, and this creates individualism, in which we believe only in our own interests. We solidify our mind and consciousness—which are naturally fluid and harmonious—into material entities. We become hard individuals who communicate through anger and arrogance. We believe that what will satisfy us is material, and with this view we create a hard, angry, and materialistic world.

At present, the world seems to be running on self-centeredness, speed, and aggression. As this pattern exacerbates, the possibility of peace, both personally and socially, will diminish. Materialism will never make us happy because it is of a different nature than consciousness. Even though material things are important, they are not fundamentally at the core of human beings. The antidote for this materialistic outlook is peace, the opposite of stress.

Rinpoche goes on to say that mindfulness — “the ability to appreciate our own life, moment to moment, because we are able to access our own consciousness” — is the key to creating internal peace.  It is a way to create a distinction between an overwhelmingly material world and the inner buffer that allows us to actually notice how we feel, as we feel it.

At first it’s just a matter of trying to be present, so we connect with our breath.  The we have to remember to follow the breath, come back to the breath, and let the thoughts go.  As our sense faculties — sight, sound, smell, taste, touch — begin to relax, we start noticing how we feel.  Our consciousness has not become more subtle and soft.  What we are feeling is the mindfulness of being alive.

Using mindfulness to cultivate internal peace reduces our own aggressiveness (and our less-than-ideal responses to what happens around us) and plugs us into the fundamental interconnectedness that underpins life as we know it.

It is the key to letting one’s inner light shine.  And yet, next to actually finding the time to meditate, it’s the most difficult task I face in life.  I don’t need to “find” the answer because it’s already there.  I need to create the space within to bring that answer to the surface.

January 27th, 2010 | Category: Buddhism, Mindfulness, Spirituality | Leave a comment

The images and stories coming out of Haiti are heart-crushing. Our world is so small, so interconnected. The feeling of helplessness that so many people feel right now is only amplified by the fact that we can watch live as bodies pile up on the streets of Port-au-Prince.

I am struggling with the overwhelming sense of grief. Watching the evening news brings tears to my eyes and makes my chest ache. A video taken the morning after the earthquake tells the real story: muffled cries of misery, pain and anguish combine to fill the air with a dull roar of unimaginable sorrow.

I can’t let myself look away when the shattered body of young child is on the screen because it reminds me that we are fragile beings, and that this human birth is the most precious of gifts. Seeing this devastation, and the human suffering that has resulted, causes deep feelings of compassion and loving-kindness, and pain, to well up within my soul. I realize I am connected to Haiti, and to Haitians, and to the men and women who are working to bring relief in the midst of this devastation.

Om mani padme hung.

A body in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, covered with dust from a collapsed building. The search was still on for survivors two days after a devastating earthquake. Photo credit: Damon Winter|The New York Times

January 15th, 2010 | Category: World News | Leave a comment