The Chenrezig Report

My Nepali heart son flew off last Thursday to Australia to begin his 2014 world tour. He plays the bansuri, a simple bamboo flute, and has become so wildly popular, his every post on Facebook instantly attracts at least 600 fawning Likes. He tours as the extra man, the unplugged Asian musician added to a European duo with electronic keyboards and guitars. The trio specializes in "kirtan", which translates loosely as sacred chant or what it calls "ecstatic chanting."  Whatever name, their performance comes across as religion with a rock beat. You might say they turn sacred Hindu and Buddhist mantras normally heard in ashrams and monasteries into public karaoke--  Strum, strum, strum, om shanti shanti all together hum hum trill  strum trillweeeeeet om... Om mani ...strum strum... peme... tweeeet...hung...

A young LA friend of mine dismisses this phenomenon as "kumbaya." I wanted to disparage it too, not as kumbaya but "Ma do na", sacrilege. What else to call people profiting from the last holy words on Earth, with electronic instruments no less. But crabby me took their efforts too personally. My perspective was not wide enough to see their screaming success fed by the world's mammoth, insatiable hunger for what's left of the sacred in it. As capitalists chant in their holy mantra: they found a need and filled it. 

The craving for kumbaya, for something corporations haven't co-opted for cash, has given this trio a global brand. In all our diversity, our longing to transcend our stressful daily lives and touch the inner peace of the sacred is one and the same need. More and more people flock to these Om Tare om Svaha singalongs for pain relief. The box office is bigger than Bach, older solace for the sore spirit. Fans pronounce the trio members' names with hushed awe. They wait for the next year's tour stop by soaking up CDs. Every year more improbable non kombucha places are added to their tour: Moscow, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Kiev, Phoenix, Lima, Montreal... . Even when the venue is huge (Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Town Hall in New York, the Stockholm Concert Hall), tickets sell out. The duo my heartson joined and works for have magnetized so much money, they have offshore bank accounts. He and his bag of bamboo flew to Australia in first class.

Part of the allure is the crowd itself, the sense that here among, say 850 others all singing along, one is not alone in one's misery. It's okay to let it be public. The way the 60s kumbaya singalongs were, led by the venerable Pete Seeger who just died. Many people winced at that news.

My heart son tells me he has lost all interest in becoming the gazillion dollar rock star he could be because he gets tremendous satisfaction using his time and talent to make people actually feel better. The do-good aspect of the feel-good music, the thought that he is helping others, continues to inspire him to stay in this particular line of bansuri work. 

And it does do good. In the interest of full disclosure, I admit my little charity Veggiyana is the recipient of 1/3 of the profits from one single CD and to date we have been blessed with $15,000 that is buying food fields at our Nepalese monastery, more orchard work at the monastery in Vancouver, more cooking classes and food for our boarding school in Kathmandu, real food for a remote new monastery high in the Himalayas where there has been famine, and monsoon protection for our nunnery garden there as well. That's my ecstatic chant. 

Sacred music isn't the only thing spiritually hungry people crave nowadays. As I've written before, mindfulness and meditation are trending white hot. They were the cover of last week's TIME, advertised by a porcelain skinned, young blonde right off the cover of SELF. Sort of Cash and Carry Buddhism for Whole Foods shoppers. Meditation was on the agenda at the just concluded Davos Forum of world makers and shakers. In typical Davos style, the corporate benefits of Buddhism were advertised to the powers that fee by a celebrity endorser, the movie star Goldie Hawn. Yes, how to stay focused on lust for your brand in a distracting world.  Kah..shing! Kah...shing! Or as Rinpoche's monks jokingly chant: Oh money may me come.

As soon as it was announced the world's best advertisement for the benefits of meditation, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, was coming to San Francisco in February, in less than five minutes Symphony Hall sold out. People were willing to pay anything, anything.... Kah...shing! Kah...shing!

Meanwhile, no-tech meditation continues to fascinate the high-tech minded of Silicon Valley. As I wrote earlier, a Dharma brother of mine who works for Adobe Systems fielded so many questions about his personal practice, he finally set up a lunch time meditation group. The start-up took off to the point where my friend actually set up a scientific study to measure the mental, emotional and physical benefits of 15 minutes of daily meditation. He got about 250 volunteers. He also got stellar test scores: significant fall in blood pressure and heart problems, significant rise in joy at work. The most heartbreaking comment I saw on the secret final report  was: "I just learned I don't need to worry about what I couldn't get done in the moment. There will be more moments, fresh chances. I've never been taught this."   

This past weekend while we were hosting two of our Rinpoche's most senior lamas, my friend told me the outcome of his project is that a consortium of three universities is taking his project a step further by pulling together via Iphone app a massive scientific study of the benefits of corporate cubicle meditation.  Maybe when it's all over, they will be able to sell a magic bullet or perhaps just an app for on the job meditation. Oy oy oh mmm kah...shing!

So now we know the Buddha was onto something, something that's becoming more desirable than a ride on the SST, a third penthouse, two Tesla's and an iPhone 5C. Now we know how much suffering there is in the world, and how little those things have done to liberate us from it. Kumbaya.

Do you know what that really means? Not what the Urban Dictionary tells you: "blandly pious and naively optimistic"--which I'd call Fox News. No, Kumbaya comes from the American South's lowland Gullah (Creole) dialect. It comes from an old Negro spiritual, a prayer from the oppressed for divine intervention, the American equivalent of our Buddhist prayer to Chenrezig, the stainless white deity who sees and soothes all suffering. It's "English" for the mantra--which my heartson's trio sings at every show-- om mani peme hung. It means: "Come by here, Lord, where people are suffering." Only a Republican on Fox News would have a problem with that.


 P.S. That said, I am going to try and enter this current of meditation events. In the spirit of the Buddha who created the first open source software for the hard driving mind, and in the spirit of Chenrezig who wants to soothe all suffering, I am going to start to post on this site free lessons in what meditation means and what is the real deal. Feel free to share them with everyone.

~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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