TIDINGS OF DISCOMFORT AND JOY
Emaho!
Timing, people say, is everything, like location. And right now, in the very season of singing Joy to the world the Lord has come, word has gone out that the Buddha is born into our world. Sorry, I meant born again.
I am not sure how 2500 years ago word spread that the itinerant beggar Gautama Siddhartha really was THE Buddha, but in 2005 we lucky stiffs have Google. Upon hearing the rumor, I typed Buddha boy in Nepal and Hung! out of the cyberkaya an image instantly self-generated of a half clothed teenager sitting in full lotus in the hollow of a pipal tree. (I love it that Microsoft in its know-it-all way keeps trying to make pipal papal.) All the headlines proclaim he’s been unmoved for almost six months with no time outs for food or drink or a pee. This is an inhuman feat that makes the Tamang boy a marvel to modern science. He’s even been bitten in this dense forest by poisonous snakes but evidently this did not distract or even faze him. What’s wrong with this picture? A lot of people are asking.
The scene is set in southern Nepal not that far from Lumbini where lots of textbooks tell us Shakyamuni Buddha was born to a woman named Maya Devi, which happens to be the very name of this young man’s mother. Evidently, this Maya Devi is a religious sort who took her brood on a pilgrimage that included Lumbini, Bodh Gaya and a number of Buddhist monasteries and upon the family return, this sixth of her nine children—always a bit odd, she volunteered, snuck off in the middle of the night to take up this weird residence. She fainted when she found out but it seems almost everybody else in the village started standing guard or set up a souvenir or tea stand to cash in.
Ram Bahadur Bamjan has not interrupted his intense meditation to say much, only to respond to those who brazenly ask him if he is the Buddha that he is only a Rinpoche. He is only in the primary, the kindergarten, phase of enlightenment so he needs to stay put for six more years and plans to do just that. Since already 10,000 pilgrims or curiosity seekers a day are reported to have made their way to this undistinguished thicket, that pipal tree is becoming a money tree. Nepalese authorities feel compelled to investigate.
The story stops there but the questions go on. Ke garne? as the Nepali people say, “what to do?”
Cultures in collapse commonly yearn for a Messiah to save them and there are always hawk eyed marketing men willing to produce one the way, say, Saul, John and Peter, came up with Joshua of Nazareth as Jesus Christ when the Jewish people hit rock bottom. The Nepalis have been that low seemingly forever but the political pressure cooker has boiled to such a high that the moment of implosion seems to be any minute now, partly because their demonic king’s tight embrace of China is squeezing their deeply rooted religion out of them. (Which is why those authorities aren’t putting any genuine Rinpoches on the case.) What a logical time and place then for the Buddha to rise to the rescue--in the land of his earlier birth.
There is also our own desperation at the downhill ski the world has taken. It’s slid further down now than 25 years ago when one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons showed a well dressed husband and wife standing at an airline ticket counter demanding: “Do you fly anywhere the moral climate isn’t hopelessly devastated?” and the other showed a TV news anchor reporting: “Today in civilization declines led advances by a wide margin.” A song snippet from those days might best describe our time and place: “Help! Help! I need somebody.”
It is possible to believe that now is the time because the Buddha did appear under similar circumstances about 25 or 2600 years ago. So more or less in that vague time frame did Jainism, Confucius, Sun Tzu with The Art of War, Moses’ 10 commandments, Homer’s Odyssey, Aesop’s Fables, Sophocles, Zoroastrianism (thus spake Zarathustra that everything is polarized into light or dark, good or bad). The late great Buddhist scholar Edward Conze said there is a connection between the arising of the Buddha and Jains and the rise of the Iron Age which allowed men for the first time to forge weapons of crass destruction. The ensuing and potential damage cried out for new laws of human behavior. Enter the concepts of compassion, first do no harm, thou shalt not kill, and the true art of war being not going to war. Odysseus had to spend 20 years forgetting he had been a warrior and learning how to be a family man. That list of names seems to be one loud multicultural shout to put that spear, sword and pen knife down and love your neighbor as yourself.
According to classical myths, the Iron Age would be the last and worst. But we’ve fooled them. We’ve made what you might literally call a quantum leap and landed ourselves in the nuclear age. For the first time-- maybe just not in Iraq, we have weapons of mass destruction. Now that any angry body’s itchy little trigger finger can blow up the entire earth in a nanosecond, new codes of behavior have been emerging as all this New Age stuff. We have the new Nichiren Buddhism coming out of Japan, the Green Party born in Germany, a peace movement seeded in America’s Asian bloodbaths. We are touchy feely (not standoffish), organic (no chemicals), vegetarian (no killing animals), doctors and copycats without borders (no nationalistic rivalries) and flocking in significant numbers to Buddhadharma (no shopping, no hating). What a nick of time for a Buddha comeback.
The ancient Mayan calendar stops at just about the year this meditating being will reach 21 and come out from under his tree. If he truly is a Buddha, Hallelujah. Let us rejoice! If he is not—and he himself has never said he is—what a poignant hoax. His is a glorious aspiration for in today's world con men rig up pyramid schemes or get rich quick embezzlements to run off with money. Because that is what we worship, everyone wants to be one way or the other a corporate czar, political potentate or media mogul. You have to hand it to someone whose scheme is simply to be the Buddha. We don’t even make Halloween costumes for that.
If he is the Buddha, we've got six years to tame our aggressive desire to get close and pray to every deity whose image we can generate that he is kept far from the madding crowd. We all know how everyone will try to lay claim and make money. If he is not, maybe he can be like that fabled old dog's tooth, the one the old woman so wanted to believe was actually the Buddha's it turned out to bring her just as many blessings as the real deal. Whether this news is emaho! or Ho Ho Ho! the mere fact that the Buddha's name is in headlines, the mere thought that it could be possible for Buddha to take birth again in our messed up world and the idea that people see box office in Buddha really does send a little joy to the world. Om hung all ye faithful.
Technorati Tags: Tidings of Discomfort and Joy. The Buddha. Yours In The Dharma. Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist
Timing, people say, is everything, like location. And right now, in the very season of singing Joy to the world the Lord has come, word has gone out that the Buddha is born into our world. Sorry, I meant born again.
I am not sure how 2500 years ago word spread that the itinerant beggar Gautama Siddhartha really was THE Buddha, but in 2005 we lucky stiffs have Google. Upon hearing the rumor, I typed Buddha boy in Nepal and Hung! out of the cyberkaya an image instantly self-generated of a half clothed teenager sitting in full lotus in the hollow of a pipal tree. (I love it that Microsoft in its know-it-all way keeps trying to make pipal papal.) All the headlines proclaim he’s been unmoved for almost six months with no time outs for food or drink or a pee. This is an inhuman feat that makes the Tamang boy a marvel to modern science. He’s even been bitten in this dense forest by poisonous snakes but evidently this did not distract or even faze him. What’s wrong with this picture? A lot of people are asking.
The scene is set in southern Nepal not that far from Lumbini where lots of textbooks tell us Shakyamuni Buddha was born to a woman named Maya Devi, which happens to be the very name of this young man’s mother. Evidently, this Maya Devi is a religious sort who took her brood on a pilgrimage that included Lumbini, Bodh Gaya and a number of Buddhist monasteries and upon the family return, this sixth of her nine children—always a bit odd, she volunteered, snuck off in the middle of the night to take up this weird residence. She fainted when she found out but it seems almost everybody else in the village started standing guard or set up a souvenir or tea stand to cash in.
Ram Bahadur Bamjan has not interrupted his intense meditation to say much, only to respond to those who brazenly ask him if he is the Buddha that he is only a Rinpoche. He is only in the primary, the kindergarten, phase of enlightenment so he needs to stay put for six more years and plans to do just that. Since already 10,000 pilgrims or curiosity seekers a day are reported to have made their way to this undistinguished thicket, that pipal tree is becoming a money tree. Nepalese authorities feel compelled to investigate.
The story stops there but the questions go on. Ke garne? as the Nepali people say, “what to do?”
Cultures in collapse commonly yearn for a Messiah to save them and there are always hawk eyed marketing men willing to produce one the way, say, Saul, John and Peter, came up with Joshua of Nazareth as Jesus Christ when the Jewish people hit rock bottom. The Nepalis have been that low seemingly forever but the political pressure cooker has boiled to such a high that the moment of implosion seems to be any minute now, partly because their demonic king’s tight embrace of China is squeezing their deeply rooted religion out of them. (Which is why those authorities aren’t putting any genuine Rinpoches on the case.) What a logical time and place then for the Buddha to rise to the rescue--in the land of his earlier birth.
There is also our own desperation at the downhill ski the world has taken. It’s slid further down now than 25 years ago when one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons showed a well dressed husband and wife standing at an airline ticket counter demanding: “Do you fly anywhere the moral climate isn’t hopelessly devastated?” and the other showed a TV news anchor reporting: “Today in civilization declines led advances by a wide margin.” A song snippet from those days might best describe our time and place: “Help! Help! I need somebody.”
It is possible to believe that now is the time because the Buddha did appear under similar circumstances about 25 or 2600 years ago. So more or less in that vague time frame did Jainism, Confucius, Sun Tzu with The Art of War, Moses’ 10 commandments, Homer’s Odyssey, Aesop’s Fables, Sophocles, Zoroastrianism (thus spake Zarathustra that everything is polarized into light or dark, good or bad). The late great Buddhist scholar Edward Conze said there is a connection between the arising of the Buddha and Jains and the rise of the Iron Age which allowed men for the first time to forge weapons of crass destruction. The ensuing and potential damage cried out for new laws of human behavior. Enter the concepts of compassion, first do no harm, thou shalt not kill, and the true art of war being not going to war. Odysseus had to spend 20 years forgetting he had been a warrior and learning how to be a family man. That list of names seems to be one loud multicultural shout to put that spear, sword and pen knife down and love your neighbor as yourself.
According to classical myths, the Iron Age would be the last and worst. But we’ve fooled them. We’ve made what you might literally call a quantum leap and landed ourselves in the nuclear age. For the first time-- maybe just not in Iraq, we have weapons of mass destruction. Now that any angry body’s itchy little trigger finger can blow up the entire earth in a nanosecond, new codes of behavior have been emerging as all this New Age stuff. We have the new Nichiren Buddhism coming out of Japan, the Green Party born in Germany, a peace movement seeded in America’s Asian bloodbaths. We are touchy feely (not standoffish), organic (no chemicals), vegetarian (no killing animals), doctors and copycats without borders (no nationalistic rivalries) and flocking in significant numbers to Buddhadharma (no shopping, no hating). What a nick of time for a Buddha comeback.
The ancient Mayan calendar stops at just about the year this meditating being will reach 21 and come out from under his tree. If he truly is a Buddha, Hallelujah. Let us rejoice! If he is not—and he himself has never said he is—what a poignant hoax. His is a glorious aspiration for in today's world con men rig up pyramid schemes or get rich quick embezzlements to run off with money. Because that is what we worship, everyone wants to be one way or the other a corporate czar, political potentate or media mogul. You have to hand it to someone whose scheme is simply to be the Buddha. We don’t even make Halloween costumes for that.
If he is the Buddha, we've got six years to tame our aggressive desire to get close and pray to every deity whose image we can generate that he is kept far from the madding crowd. We all know how everyone will try to lay claim and make money. If he is not, maybe he can be like that fabled old dog's tooth, the one the old woman so wanted to believe was actually the Buddha's it turned out to bring her just as many blessings as the real deal. Whether this news is emaho! or Ho Ho Ho! the mere fact that the Buddha's name is in headlines, the mere thought that it could be possible for Buddha to take birth again in our messed up world and the idea that people see box office in Buddha really does send a little joy to the world. Om hung all ye faithful.
Technorati Tags: Tidings of Discomfort and Joy. The Buddha. Yours In The Dharma. Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist
posted by Sandy Garson @ 10:44 PM
1 Comments:
At 12/23/2005 05:20:00 PM,
An Educational Voyage said…
It would be wonderful indeed if the real Buddah stood up! The wait for Moshiach still goes on, as does the wait for the second coming of Christ. Everyone seems to be waiting for some divine presence to put the brakes on our down hill slide.
Ke garne?
I think that it is the WAIT, and HOW we wait that counts. To coin a phrase from Whats My Line- will the real one please stand up, or sit in full lotus position? I think it is the little doings of our daily lives that fill the wait and probably speeds or delays the arrival. This season which inspires such hope in so many, is an opportune time to assess our contributions to the arrival or delay...
I do enjoy they way your articles make the gray matter spark!
Om hung to you dear wordsmith!
~JRY
An Educational Voyage
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