HOLY GOALIE

His Holiness the Dalai Lama was dutifully in Berkeley April 25 to help the American Himalayan Foundation raise more money at a splashy event. But as usual when he comes to town, he also dutifully visited his own people. Somewhat hastily, the local Tibetans in exile arranged a public audience, and sold tickets to cover its costs. I was thrilled to be invited to it by Tibetan friends, for it isn’t everyday you get a legal way to eavesdrop on private conversation.

Mongolians were there too, a surprising lot of them, easy to distinguish because they wear pointed little caps that are distinctly not Tibetan. Their vanguard had specifically been invited to His Holiness’s last Tibetan assembly two years ago, and he started that one by forcefully insisting both groups recognize each other as inseparable family, if not sisters and brothers as he called them, then at least first cousins who share a common cultural and religious bloodline. Was it not, after all, the Mongolian emperor who gave the Dalai Lama his name, nine incarnations back? His Holiness implored the two groups to stick together to keep their common culture from falling apart in exile. He suggested Tibetans establish a community center where Mongolians would be welcome, and recommended using it to set up mother tongue language classes for children born here, social gatherings and artistic programs, anything to keep their culture on life support.

This reminded me that more than twenty years ago, His Holiness began a concerted campaign of consulting Jewish organizations for advice on how a people can survive whole in the tatters of Diaspora. Evidently His Holiness noticed Jews seem to excel at hanging on to their Jewishness wherever they end up. Among the anti-assimilation lessons he learned was the value of inculcating children both at home and away in an essentially parallel universe of specifically Jewish community centers, day or overnight camps, and nursery schools. At one point, I was asked to link the education director of the Tibetan Children’s Villages, headquartered in Dharamsala, with various American camping associations, Jewish and not, so the Tibetans could send teachers over to work as summer counselors, getting first hand, how-to experience in campfire circles, color war, arts and crafts, and volleyball.

This year’s program began with Tibetans proudly telling His Holiness they raised half a million dollars for a community center, most of it from two large, well-known foundations. Then they showed off their newly established Sunday morning language and cultural classes with a children’s chorus, all three dozen members dressed in one form or other of chuba. A few plucked Tibetan “guitars”, blew into wooden flutes, or banged drums as the rest serenaded His Holiness not just with folk songs, but with the free Tibet’s anthem. That of course brought down the house and a lot of tears. His Holiness seemed very moved.

I say “seemed” because the Tibetans in charge of this event decided to stuff all us “yellow hairs”, or Westerners, up in the peanut gallery of the venue’s balcony. In surprisingly blatant discrimination, Tibetans and Mongolians were sent through one entrance, Westerners forced to go around the block to another. We all actually met in the middle of the courtyard where security lines were also segregated, at least until they stopped moving and a concerned monk began directing westerners into the Tibetan/Mongolian lines, churning up the sort of pandemonium sadly common to Tibetan gatherings in Asia where frantic pushing and shoving frequently causes injuries.

I stood in line over an hour for an event that took maybe 35 minutes, these words of Tibetan friends echoing in my mind: "We don't mind. We'd stand for two days just to see His Holiness pass by in a car." The security check that had been holding it up cleared away all cameras, backpacks and bottles of water. All tickets were for general seating, but the left orchestra section was strictly reserved for Mongolians, the center for Tibetans, and the balcony for the rest of us, called in the signage: Westerners and Dharma students. It was packed. Rumor had it the Tibetan section was way oversold.

The mistress of ceremonies proudly announced the Tibetan flag was flying high over Berkeley, and the theater resounded with enthusiastic cheering for the city council. Only six weeks before, the California state legislature had been blocked by its Chinese-American members from acknowledging March 10, the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese genocide. That’s how easily the flow of Chinese money drowns American morality these days, making us complicit in their crimes. Here's to Bezerkly’s defiant tradition of free speech!

The Tibetans introduced their latest venture, a quilt project for which all families in exile in California have been invited to sew a square with the names of relatives killed in the uprising for independence, or the ongoing genocide. The initial quilt was unfurled and presented to His Holiness who politely held it up for all to see. From my far perch, it looked to be white on the edges with red and blue squares arranged within. The wicked part of me realized how Americanized this project was because the Tibetans weren’t making carpets. But this fleeting thought was quickly replaced by one about how increasingly urgent His Holiness' aspiration has become for exiled Tibetans to find ways not only to refresh the world’s memory about their plight, but to keep alive their own of Tibet. Of their genocide the Jews could proclaim Never Again! But Chinese’s new monetary muscle means for the Tibetans, Ever Again, which means His Holiness is now a goalie stuck in the cage smacking back to fend off the opposition’s efforts to score. Dutifully responding to his plea to Tibetans making their way to the freedom of America to use that freedom to tell Tibet’s story, my Khampa goddaughter recently launched Voices of Tibet, a project dedicated to interviewing on videotape the remaining survivors of the great escape to give their great grandchildren and the rest of us authentic, uncensored history. You can read all about it at www.Voices of Tibet.org.

Finally His Holiness spoke. You never know what he’s going to say, so I leaned forward to hear as best I could. He went straight into a new and ingenious save the culture tack. Mongolians and Tibetans, he started, surprisingly adding Nepalese and Indians, even people who live inside the traditional borders of China, “when we study and practice Buddhism, we are all one, the same, without nationality to separate us.” Reminding everyone in the audience that Buddhism was inherent in Himalayan culture, perhaps its common cause,--he mentioned Ladakh in India and ancient kingdoms like Mustang in Nepal which are far from Mongolia-- he urged more and more serious Dharma study. “Buddhism has no nationality,” he repeated. “In this, all of us become one.” Of course he meant Tibetan Buddhism, implying Tibetan culture could be kept alive in the entire swath of the Himalayas as well as the entire swath of the Americas--anywhere people, for instance, chant Om Mani Padme Hung or present a khata.

The Dalai Lama went on to say accurate understanding of the Dharma of Nagarjuna and Shantirakshita—the Indian Buddhadharma that became the Mahayana and made its way to Tibet to turn into the Vajrayana, could only come from being as close to the lineage origin as possible. Since the Sanskrit or Pali or subsequent Indian original teachings had been lost to time and the Muslim invasion, the closest we come today would be original translations of Marpa and others into Tibetan. Therefore to study Dharma properly means learning Tibetan. This is a canny way to keep the language alive, one that my teacher also tries on grounds that every subsequent translation into whatever dialect or language alters the true meaning in the same way subtle shifts happen in, say, whispering down the lane.

Lastly, His Holiness reminded the Tibetans that when they came out of Tibet, peacefully settled around new monasteries, and went quietly about their Buddhist business, they were very much on moral high ground. Thus they easily earned the world’s sympathy. To keep that means keeping the moral high ground, allowing absolutely no slippage from best behavior. “This is all we have left,” he warned. “I am personally not bothered by the Chinese more and more fiercely calling me names because this is all they have left. It is a sign of weakness. Even the Chinese people have begun to see the justice of our cause. So we must continue it as we have done, nonviolently with the moral force of our excellent conduct.” The applause was deafening.

The Dalai Lama bowed and left.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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MY OH MY MYANMAR

Last week I got an unexpected email from a Buddhist monk of Bhutanese family who is an important part of my Rinpoche's sangha in Nepal. This is what he said:

We just got phone call with our sister living in Yangon about a few hours ago.
We saw on BBC world, saying that 200 monks were arrested. The true picture is far worse!!!!!!!!!

For one instance, the monastery at an obscure neighborhood of Yangon, called Ngwe Kyar Yan (on Wei-za-yan-tar Road, Yangon) had been raided early this morning. A troop of lone-tein (riot police comprised of paid thugs) protected by the military trucks, raided the monastery with 200 studying monks. They systematically ordered all the monks to line up and banged and crushed each one's head against the brick wall of the monastery. One by one, the peaceful, non resisting monks, fell to the ground, screaming in pain. Then, they tore off the red robes and threw them all in the military trucks (like rice bags) and took the bodies away.

The head monk of the monastery, was tied up in the middle of the monastery, tortured , bludgeoned, and later died the same day, today. Tens of thousands of people gathered outside the monastery, warded off by troops with bayoneted rifles, unable to help their helpless monks being slaughtered inside the monastery. Their every try to forge ahead was met with the bayonets.

When all is done, only 10 out of 200 remained alive, hiding in the monastery. Blood stained everywhere on the walls and floors of the monastery.

Please tell your audience of the full extent of the fate of the monks please please !!!!!!!!!!!!
'Arrested' is not enough expression. They have been bludgeoned to death !!!!!!
Aye Aye

And now a friend from DC has phoned in can you believe it ecstasy to report His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been invited to speak from the Capitol steps on October 17. Emaho! as Tibetan texts exclaim when they want to say: wondrous news here!

How often does the lone lobbyist for humanity face the K Street money crowd? Given the nasty interferences around attempts to award this Nobel Peace Prize winner a Congressional Medal of Honor because he inspires people to believe in compassion for others, and given the secrecy in which the medal presentation had been swathed, lest it arouse the kind of noisy protests from China launderers his attempted meeting with President Clinton once did, suddenly awarding this fulltime Buddhist freedom of speech--in a political spotlight no less, seems the sort of miracle Catholics like to enshrine. Amen.

Duh! though to figure why Washington suddenly got religion, and rushed to produce this last minute event. Every American who has not been in the outer space of Mars or mall marts in the last ten days knows that Buddhist monks in Burma have systematically been burned, bashed and banished by a handful of military thugs hellbent on monopolizing all profits from the country’s resources. Their belief is compression for others, its ironclad mantra the old childish one: what’s yours is mine, based on the original Sanskrit, oh money pay me some. As they continue to repeat and visualize this without interruption, thousands of human beings including silent monks with begging bowls get deleted in the profit margin.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is of course a simple Buddhist monk; that's how he invariably describes himself. So it’s a feel good photo op for Washington, which isn’t going to do anything about Burma, to put him on display to create the appearance that America respects Buddhist monks—for the moment anyway. Burmese people, we are with you on this one.

Unfortunately, the Dalai Lama is also the living reminder of hundreds of thousands of Buddhist monks burned, bashed and banished in Tibet over the last fifty years by a land full of thugs hellbent on compression to monopolize profits too. What’s yours is ours, is the Chinese mantra of Tibet. That’s why it’s sadly hilarious to hear the American government ask the Chinese, who are also funding the psychotic Burmese despots, to tell their Burmese resource suppliers to cut it out. Especially when you read on uncensored BBC news how very busy the Chinese are right now forcibly lassoing and corralling 100,000 Tibetan nomads into block housing, abruptly ending their thousand year life style traditions and probably their lives, to secure the territory they were grazing herds on at the headwaters of the Yalu and Yangtse Rivers. This last roundup is Chinese for: get out of the way because what’s yours is mine every which way there is.

Deliberately echoing FDR at our entry into WWII, George W. Bush forced marched America into Iraq by proclaiming we were compassionately saving human beings from a grabby, psychopathic bully. But human beings in Myanmar are being burned alive in crematoria, bloodthirstily bashed against the walls of monasteries and banished in the middle of the night—15 monasteries are totally empty—and all he can manage is a surge of phone calls to the Chinese to ask if they would mind, please, to stop this horrid sequel to Tibet 1959. Not even the brilliant writers for the Comedy Channel’s Daily News dare to make this double hypocrisy funny.

Oops, make that a triple, because diverting attention from the glaring inaction by pushing the revered Dalai Lama to the front is presenting the monk in red robes to the public as a red herring.

Who knows how His Holiness, survivor of genocidal massacre, will use the world’s one pure voice of good conscience on the Capitol lawn here at America’s moral and morale nadir. Certainly the planet’s stars have misaligned enough to give this gentle man literally from the high ground a magnificent moment to lobby to achieve something a bit more balanced for the seesaw totally tipped to put profits in the stratosphere, people in the ground.

The interdependence of everything could be his topic, for it is one His Holiness often teaches, patiently explaining the twelve-steps of samsara known as the nidanas, for which the science, math and logic translation probably is: if A therefore B, guaranteed. One thing, everything, arises in dependence on something that just happened. Nothing goes to waste. Every action generates reaction, no exceptions, binding us all into the tangled web Shakespeare pointed out we weave. The whole point of the Buddha’s originally spinning the wheel of Dharma was to alert us to the absolute impossibility of anyone escaping these clutches of inevitability or what we might call this cosmic spin job, this morphing I think of as the karmic boomerang: what goes round comes back at you.

The fuzzy interdependence of a butterfly flapping its wings in Wisconsin provoking a typhoon to strike Taiwan can look a lot less puzzling when the demise of Buddhist monks in Burma allows the rise of a Buddhist monk on the Capitol lawn. It works like this: somewhere back in time, like a butterfly’s wings, somebody’s heart fluttered at the thought or sight of something they craved and typhoons of violence thunder across the globe right now.

For example, the Thai people who are as devoutly Buddhist as the Burmese next door are said to be scandalized as well as mortified by the wanton violence against silent saffron clad monks. They want it stopped. Yet their government cannot speak up and will not ride to any monastic’s rescue because the lights, computers, car fuel and cash flows that animate Thailand depend on the resources—natural gas, hydropower and oil-- purchased from Myanmar, from its monopolizing thugs. The calculation is: no risk to the government —to me here-- from a blackout of Burmese civilians and monks over there, but a huge risk of riot here from any blackout in Bangkok’s busy office towers. It is a basic bottom of the line business decision. That's why Thais feed the Burmese madmen money. They are addicted to lights, cameras and car action—most modern technology provides feel good highs just like cocaine. Then the Burmese generals use the funds to buy the brutalizing weapons for mass destruction necessary to get rid of the Burmese people who remind them they are stealing.

We can substitute the Chinese for the Thais in these same sentences. Actually, we can substitute America and change Burma to a dozen other dictatorships. The slash and earn policy has endless precedents, the latest being our four-year foray into Iraq to grab its oil.

The United States of America was bred, born and burped by human beings brutally snatching from other human beings in a disingenuous game of mine! It started with the original British merchants who, desperate to become tycoons, blindly grabbed the land and riches of a newly discovered continent as though nobody lived here, and it moved through the Pilgrims and Puritans who dispatched the natives to usurp their bounty, went west with their American descendants who pushed that genocidal policy from the Atlantic to the other ocean, grabbing everything in sight along the way. Greed made us what we are today.

Despite its subsequent glamorization, the Revolution was a ploy to stop British infringement of Boston’s profits once its merchants had become world class. Its coda, the War 1812, was a similar a fight to the finish for ownership of lucrative fishing grounds. The atrocious, devastating secret buried in the wreckage of World War II is how avoidable it might have been, for there is a buried cache of evidence that decent Germans, some of American blue blood, came to enlist the help of Washington in unseating Hitler before he did destroyed Europe as he was destroying Germany. Lamentably, they were rebuffed by Roosevelt’s gatekeepers who had coldly calculated how American business could conquer the globe if Great Britain and Germany got entangled in a war. Et voila! Greed made us what we are today.

Because no government wants to fight the land that feeds it, Americans can be as scandalized and mortified as they want about the mad, merciless Burmese junta-- or calculatingly cynical Chinese commissars. But we have set the pace for greed. And as long as we want cheap energy, cheap food, cheap bling—setting an example to be emulated, the outrage is just going to be cheep cheep blowing in the wind. Hypocrisy has no legs to stand on.

So the real enemy of those Burmese monks is us. Our convenience now replicated by others has made them inconvenient. As long as our begging bowls remain turned up to take what corporations with loyalty to nothing but money are shoving down our throats, no government will to do anything to eradicate the hidden costs, will stet all those lives deleted everywhere in their profit margins.

The Dharma says to change the world just change your mind, the way you understand the world. If we were truly serious about stopping the tsunami of barbarity blotting out unarmed human beings with the same two eyes and ten fingers we have, we would struggle to black out our own craving for what belongs to somebody else, our urge to grab and avoid the honest price of our desires. In some contexts this is called rape. In any it violates the precious Ten Commandments.

The Dharma the Burmese monks are dying for advocates the extinction of that craving, that egotistic need to satisfy our self at any cost. So, while America parades His Holiness the Dalai Lama as a sideshow meant to momentarily take the brrr out of Burma, the heinous horror happening there will probably never be taken out of the news until we all become brave enough to turn our gimme bowls upside down to take all the my out of Myanmar.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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FRIGHT TO LIFE

Because it’s so all American to run out and shout: what do we want? and: When do we want it, I want to say although it isn’t Christmas, there are many things I want. These include laws preventing any child under six from boarding an airplane, thicker lips, thinner thighs and like all Miss Americas, world peace. I want it now!

I also want to admit— now--I know these things are merely my own personal, picky desires, picked fresh from the fertile ground of my imagination, which produces more wants than China does tea leaves. That’s probably why their lifespan is about as long as the attention span of today’s teenager. Wants just keep rolling along the endless conveyor belt of hope, attached to whatever comes into focus. Today, for instance, in addition to all of the above, I wanted all those people who showed up for the Dalai Lama’s teaching in shorts and tank tops to have their karma tie dyed by the decency dakinis.

I want to add, maybe somebody at His Holiness’ teaching wanted me to get karma detention for wearing lipstick. I am not alone here on the planet, not the only human thing going. I know mine are dime a dozen pipe dreams because Buddhism reminds me every day that every other human being sharing the earth with me is juggling oodles more of their own. As the Dalai Lama likes to say, everybody is chasing down happiness one way or another. This is probably why we keep running into each other, with nasty headline results: everybody wants their wants uber alles and becomes such a sore loser when that doesn’t happen. Read all about it.

As the Dalai Lama will also tell you, when you don’t like something, it’s quite human to want to make it go away. I want the airlines to get rid of all those squalling babies the parents refuse to tame. Others put erasers on pencils, lasers on chin hair, prohibitions on gays, gas chambers at Auschwitz and rudely block the entrance to gynecology centers. These are all Do Not Disturb signs flaunted like placards at a protest. What universally disturbs most people is uncertainty, the unknown, multiple choice—anything likely to create doubt. Doubt means you could be wrong. Nobody wants that.

If there are no forks left in the road and it’s all one way, that has to be the right way, (eh Sunnis and Shia?). That's why some folks are rejoicing that last week a medical procedure wanted as safe and useful in specific circumstances has been dispatched into the unwanted realm of heinous crime. They were not comfortable with the idea of it, so they wanted the reality of it to go away and got it shipped off, priority hail, to oblivion. Now these happy people don’t have to suffer doubt or negative thoughts about that sort of abortion any more. Even if women have been having abortions for thousands of years and will keep on having them like it or not, they forced on us all their preference to forget about it, to deny it.

The keenest analysis I read of the Supreme Court decision to make late term abortions a crime was that the anti-abortion mob had won the incremental war of chipping away at the right to life’s privacy, (make that: the right to female life’s privacy), by changing the dialogue and thus forever the way people picture abortion. They unleashed the tactic of making people actually see exactly what happens. Not seeing the operation as perhaps painfully wrought liberation from suffering for the mother but only as something wantonly gruesome, creates so much negativity, people do not want to think about it and thus want to do away with all abortion. The analyst said their next likely move is to force women to watch videos of actual procedures at every fetal stage to raise awareness about what really happens.

Well, nothing pleases a Buddhist more than anteing up awareness. Consciousness raising is us. We are continually training to follow our breath, watch every movement of our mind so as not to inflict our "shit" on others. We're urged to dig down to our depths to become mindful of what is actually happening as we pass through life, how much fear we have of getting what we don’t want, to wake up and smell the poses.

Naturally then, I want everyone to be more aware. And being American, I want that now. So going with the flow, I want all those folks who want to coerce others to watch videos of abortion to be forced to stand in front of the supermarket meat refrigeration bins and watch videos of animals caught in the apocalyptic horrors of factory farming. I want in their face close ups of the scare and feeding, the slaughterhouse vibe, the cellophane wrapping. I want them to see the whole antibiotic packed schmear, birth to death to barbeque.

I want them to go to sea to watch the dolphins die for their tuna fish sandwiches. After all, His Holiness the 17^th Gyalwa Karmapa recently exhorted all Tibetan Buddhists not to inflict suffering on other beings by eating them for dinner. It indicates we value ourselves above all others, disregarding the value of those others. Better for all karma concerned, he said, to eat vegetables. I want these people who so loudly proclaim the right to life to see how much life they’re lunching on.

I want these folks to be forced to see streaming videos of real time real war as it really kills, maims and upends real civilians, children, animals and young men dressed as soldiers. I want them to climb an oil rig to watch a wildcatter lose his fingers for the gasoline that powers their SUV to pizza glut. I want to know what is wrong with all these rights to life.

Forget last week’s outcry about Korean killer Cho. I want those who think doctors (whose credo is" First Do No Harm") kill but guns don’t to be force fed his video followed by pictures of NRA lobbyists (whose credo is "Show them the money") playing golf with Congressmen. I want them to see people being killed and the unquestioned profits of the manufacturers of the product that does it so niftily.

After all, if you are going to be pro life, it’s probably best to be a pro about life. I want these people to sit for ten years straight at the bedside of a human vegetable, to live on the streets with unwanted children thrown out there, to room with a woman pregnant from rape or incest or carrying a fetus she knows is fatally flawed. I want them to see life in living color because, despite how much they want it so, life is never black and white. The Buddha said: deal with it. Be aware that everything has consequences and, alas, they will never end up being pleasant, no matter how fervently you want them to. That is the truth of suffering.

Life is never as you like it. Nobody can really make that bad news, that bogeyman, go away --especially just by wanting it to or passing off their wants, their ideal, their panic, onto me. The Buddha said it’s better to reach out to others by example, by the disciplined perfection of your own life rather than by the fevered pitch of scattered sloganeering. Maybe this is because when you have your hands full minding your own business, you become aware of what tough stuff it is. You don't have the time or nerve to busybodily butt into that of strangers, wanting them to want to be exactly like you. You live and let live. That is my pro life ideal, my vision of world peace. So, that is what I want. And, of course, I want it now.

Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.

Yours In The Dharma 2001-2007, Sandy Garson @copy: 2001-2007 Sandy Garson
All rights Reserved