is what i do

I like to think of myself as a rational person. I don’t hold with superstitions or superstitious behavior—I don’t believe in fairies or gods, and I think that supplicational prayer is foolish. I believe that the methods of science have evolved into admirably rigorous tools for extending, clarifying, detailing our understanding of the universe we inhabit and our own material beings, and I am persuaded and amazed by the picture of the material world that modern science has composed. I have faith in science.

I also have faith in my own ignorance. I’ve studied widely and diligently—science, and literature, and some history, and the foundational literature of many of the world’s spiritual traditions; I know a lot, about a lot. And I have absolute faith that what I don’t know dwarfs what I know. I am profoundly ignorant.

And I have faith in the Buddha and his Dhamma (Sanskrit: dharma). That last faith has become more and more important to me over the past several years. It owes, in part, to the fact that the Buddhadhamma acknowledges my ignorance. It shows me how my ignorance is the foundation for all of the dissatisfaction that characterizes this worldly existence; it also describes a clear and persuasively logical path that may lead to an end to ignorance and suffering. Several times in my life, I have taken the first faltering steps onto that path, and I have been almost immediately confronted by something that tested my faith. That is the doctrine of kamma (Sanskrit: karma) and rebirth, and it induces doubt because it seems to conflict with that other faith—the faith in science and in the infinite nature of our ignorance.

I don’t think that I’m alone in my confusion. I think that a lot of people, attracted to Buddhism by its rational nature, by the clarity of the Blessed One’s teachings, and by the tradition’s rejection of superstition, are confused by the nature of kamma and put off by the notion of rebirth.

Part of the reason, I think, is that the idea of rebirth is mixed up in our culture with a naive concept of transmigration of souls, and that is associated with suspect sources—Madame Blavatsky and her theosophical flim-flammery, Shirley MacLaine, the psychic Jane Roberts channelling “Seth”, and others. It’s that kind of tender-minded gullibility that’s parodied in Don Marquis’ wonderful stories of Archy and Mehitabel. These are the very first words that archy, the determined cockroach, typed on Marquis’ office typewriter:

And Marquis left his readers in little doubt that there was some kammic influence at work in determining archy’s destiny; committing the sin of writing vers libre was more than enough to condemn a soul to existence as a cockroach.

In the Canki Sutta, the Buddha advised the young brahmin student Kapadika on how to discover truth. The process involves, first, finding a teacher who seems, after close observation and careful listening, to be free from greed, anger, or delusion—qualities that might lead the teacher to claim that he knows what he does not actually know or that he’s seen what he has actually not seen, or to teach a dhamma that would lead to his student’s harm in the long run. Then the student must go to the teacher, accord him respect, listen to the teachings and hear what is taught; then he must remember what he’s heard, ponder it carefully, subject it to rigorous analysis, and, when he is convinced of its worth, apply his will to the diligent practice that will make the dhamma part of his life. I’m in the middle stages of that process with regard to the Buddha’s teachings regarding self, kamma and rebirth—the stage of pondering and trying to understand. What follows, then, is an interim report.

I’m going to be talking about three things, not necessarily in strict order. First, we need to be clear about what we are talking about when we talk about kamma. Second, if we are going to be looking at the notion of rebirth, we need to be clear about what it is that is reborn, which involves an examination of the Buddhist notion of “self”. Finally, we need to re-evaluate the apparent disconnect between the scientific world view and the Buddhist notion of kamma and rebirth, to see if such a disconnect actually exists and whether there is a method of resolving it.

Kamma

The popular understanding of kamma is something akin to “fate” or “destiny”. Kamma is reified, as if it were something in its own right, and we speak of someone’s kamma as if the kamma were separate from the person—something that the person, in some way, owned. It was archy’s kamma that caused his rebirth as a cockroach. That’s very different from how the Buddha used the term.

In Buddhism, kamma is a technical term. It comes from the Sanskrit root kr, implying action, and the term kamma generally does mean action. But not every action is kamma. In the Nibbedhika Sutta, from the Anguttara Nikaya, the Buddha is teaching the bhikkhus about those things that should be known if one is to know the Dhamma; “Kamma,” he tells them, “should be known. The cause by which kamma comes into play should be known. The diversity in kamma should be known. The result of kamma should be known. The cessation of kamma should be known. The path of practice for the cessation of kamma should be known.” And this is how he begins his explanation of kamma: “Intention, I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, & intellect.”

So kamma is intentional action. And it may be physical action, or speech, or just conceiving the thought to act: kammic action doesn’t have to be overt to produce results. And it’s the results of kamma that we are interested in examining, because the kind of actions that are kamma generate results that influence, not only the course of events in the world—all action does that—but the course of life itself: whether or not the person who acts intentially will live happily, and what kind of rebirth that person will find with the decomposition of the body after death.

And now we’re zeroing in on the core of the problem. I can understand how the choices one makes and how one follows through on those choices influence one’s life and well-being. In all my experience, those people who act in cruel or hateful or deceitful or stupid ways are generally people who experience the vicissitudes of their lives most painfully and reach the end of those lives full of bitterness and despair. Contrariwise, those who are able to maintain an attitude of loving kindness, who behave generously and compassionately, who are honest and faithful to their vows, are those with the most friends, the fewest regrets, the greatest capacity for joy; and they are the ones who face the inevitable end with grace and equanimity.

But rebirth? How does that work, exactly? And just what is it that is reborn? I’m going to deal with the second question first, and I’m going to approach it in an oblique way.

Rebirth

The desktop picture on my PowerBook is a high-definition photo of Messier Object 101, a giant galaxy in the region of the Big Dipper, about 25 million light years away, containing trillions of stars. Visible in the picture, through the sparse sections of space between Object 101’s spiral arms, are dozens, probably hundreds of other galaxies, each containing billions or trillions of stars. All told, the picture on my desktop was made by the light of perhaps a million billion stars. At a conservative estimate, that picture contains more than one hundred stars for every man, woman and child who has ever lived on earth, since our species first evolved. Many or most of those stars have planets revolving around them. On many of those, probably, life has emerged. On some of the planets on which life has emerged, that life has likely evolved intelligent species.

I am not in that picture.

But when I look at my image in a mirror, I see an individual who is, almost certainly, unique in the universe (which comprises considerably more space than the small sector imaged on my laptop screen, all of that space scattered through with stars).

When a certain monk asked the Buddha how many eons had passed to bring us to the present moment, the Buddha declined to answer. The number, he said, is so large that it’s impossible to imagine it. “Then can you give me a simile?” the monk asked, and the Buddha responded with a memorable one. “Imagine a mountain,” he told the monk, “seven miles broad at the base, seven miles long, and seven miles high, made of the hardest granite. Every 100 years a man visits that mountain and gives it a single caress with a kerchief of the finest silk from Benares.”

“Now, monk, the time it would take to wear that mountain away completely is less than one complete eon.”

To which, presumably, that certain monk (who is not otherwise identified) thought “wow!” or whatever the equivalent was in the Malaghan dialect of northern India in about 500BCE.

The point is not, I think, that it’s been a really, really long time that this universe has been around, filled as it is with creation and destruction, with arising and ceasing. The point is that in all that time, among those trillions of stars, there’s been only that one certain monk. As there is, now, only this one certain person, looking at his laptop screen and thinking “wow!”

Now, that realization can be a realization of my insignificance. Of course. The universe will continue with me or without me. And of the unknowable number of sentient beings in that universe, only a very small subset knows of me. Relative to the universe and endless time, I am insignificant.

But in that “wow” experience, I also recognize my absolute significance, which is a product of my uniqueness. This little being, on this little planet, in this little corner of the big wide universe, at this momentary end point of those unimaginable eons, signifies Richard Blumberg, the only one who’s ever been or will be. I am the sole inheritor of the bundle of gifts which became mine at birth—a particular genetic endowment, a family imbued with particular values and with sufficient wealth to nourish me physically and intellectually, a society that protected my liberty, a time in the history of the world which saw the publication of the first good translations of the Buddha’s teachings into the only language I know. And with that bundle of gifts came a particular responsibility, from which neither my insignificance in the universal scheme of things, nor my uniqueness as the star player in the drama of Richard Blumberg can free me.

That responsibility is to pass on to whoever or whatever inherits the fruits of what I’ve made of my life and my opportunities at least as good a bundle of stuff as I got from those who were here before me. I don’t know who or what those entities might be, although it’s clear that they include my children, my friends, my community and the various collectives in which I’ve held membership. As for what’s passed on to whom, I can imagine some of it: my contribution to my children’s genetic endowment, their nurturance, their wealth; the memories my friends, family, and business colleagues keep of me, along with any small effect those memories might have on the beliefs and behavior of those who keep them; the jokes I’ve told and the lessons I’ve been able to teach regarding what I’ve learned, and especially what little I’ve come to understand of the Buddha’s Dharma; and thousands of small things—taxes I’ve paid, votes I’ve cast, payments I’ve made for things I’ve bought, gifts I’ve given, poems and essays and emails and letters and web pages I’ve written, businesses I’ve founded, tasks I’ve completed (or failed to complete) for those or for other businesses I’ve worked for. All those activities have generated ripples or helped shape the turbulence in whatever waters they were tossed into. All that is part of what I, Richard Blumberg, bequeath to my times and to my myriad heirs.

All that, of course—genes and jokes, taxes paid and tasks completed—will disappear in time, as all will that appears in time, as will Richard Blumberg. I will be no more, not in any form. And that may be all there is to it. In fact, that’s likely. And it’s certainly enough—enough responsibility to encourage a person to behave well and leave as much good behind as it’s possible to count.

But when we’ve counted what can be counted, and estimated what we can’t count because it is too small, too distant, too far gone, too indistinct, then we are still left with a residue that is, somehow, fundamental. Something that can’t be spread around, analyzed and distributed, but must be held together if it is to be at all.

The fundamental residue that continues to exist when all that can be destroyed, lost, diminished to nothing, has been: that, I think, has to do with the complex of concepts that surround the essential notion of kamma—

• kamma itself, of course: the set of intentional actions that a conscious being performs in the course of life;
• kamma-vipaka: the results of that kamma, both upon the particular conscious being that performed the kamma, and upon the being that inherits that kamma when the body of the kammic actor has died and disintegrated:
• kamma-vega: Nyanatiloka Mahathera translates this as “kammic energy”; Bhikkhu Bodhi refers to kammic influence. I prefer the term “influence”, because it seems to me to be more appropriate to what is, in the end, a subtle process, indistinct and difficult to analyze with the tools and techniques of thinking that we have developed in our day-to-day dealings with the material world.

Here’s how I understand it. When I was conceived, as a being with a good genetic endowment, destined to grow and acquire consciousness in a family that loved me and had the means to provide for my welfare, my moral training, and my liberal education, my nascent being became linked with a particular bundle of kammic influence that resonated in some powerful way with the being that I was and was to become. I don’t know whose kamma I inherited; I have to believe that they were a line of people who were were working deliberately to find a way to be good and to live a good life. Their kamma took birth as Richard Blumberg. And if that much is so, then it is possibly so as well that it will continue after my death, that another being will have that kamma as its inheritance, that the kamma will take birth as that being. Being is what holds kamma together. Kamma is what gives being its foundation. And each conscious being, through the span of its existence, has an effect, through the moral choices it makes and the actions it takes on the basis of those choices, on the kamma that it inherits. The being shapes the kamma.

Self

With regard to Self, the Buddha tells us that the things that we normally identify as our “Selves” are in fact transitory: our bodies; our “mental formations” (which I take to mean the discriminations we make—between I and Thou, between this and that, between the hard one and the soft one, between big and little, etc.); our perceptions, including the flow of thoughts that eddies through our minds when those are not centered (which is most of the time); our feelings and emotions; and our consciousness, including the elaborate intellectual models we make and the patterns we train ourselves to perceive in the world around us. Those five factors—form, perception, feeling, mental formations, and consciousness—are the “aggregates” that, at any given moment, constitute one’s being. But each of those is fleeting: even my body is not the same as the body I had when I began this sentence; the molecules flowing through my bloodstream have been renewed several times; my posture is different; the position of my muscles, the state of the synapses within my nervous system, the levels of various hormones circulating, the amount of my last meal that’s been transmuted into shit and piss—all that has undergone innumerable changes of state in the few moments that have passed.

In light of that undeniable impermanence, the concept of a permanent Self, an “I” that somehow exists unchanged at least from birth to death, seems suspect.

On a larger scale, too, the idea of a permanent Self seems absurd. This planet Earth, this star Sol, this Milky Way galaxy, all had a birth, and all will come to nothing in time, will be no longer distinguishable as planet, star, galaxy. Even our universe, in the most recent reanalysis of the numbers, seems to be just a moment in an ongoing flux of universes exploding into being and then collapsing into nothingness again. And where in all that can any Self find permanence?

Still, now, here, I know who is typing these words. And I’m pretty sure that I’m the only one who’s ever been or will be, across all imaginable universes.

Resolution

The concept of kamma does two things to help my understanding with regard to the dilemma of self. First, if kamma is foundational to my existence, and if I inherited my foundational kamma from a line of beings that went before me, and if the fruits of my kamma in this life—the moral choices I make and the intentional actions I perform—go on after the dissolution of this body to inform the life of another conscious being, then that continuity explains the strong feeling I have that I exist and have a unique identity, despite my clear recognition, on analysis of the case, that there is nothing physically to ground that identity on.

Second, and vastly more significantly, it explains why I was born who I am, with the good fortune I’ve had, and was not born to an aids-infected mother in the slums of Rio. The concept of kamma—the dynamics of kamma, kamma-vipaka, and kamma-vega, define the moral dynamics of the universe in a way that material science cannot and does not try to do. Kamma explains what science will never explain—the luck of the draw. In the material world, as it’s understood by science, you draw your hand, and you can play it well and win, or play it poorly and lose, or you can pass; however you play it, it has no bearing on the next hand you’re dealt. In a universe understood through a kammic perspective, if the hand you’re dealt is your life as a conscious being, it does matter how you play it. If you play it well—make skillful moral choices, behave in wholesome ways, pursue enlightenment, then the next round of play will deal you a better hand.

The Buddha is quite clear that kammic causality operates just as implacably as physical causality. In the Paccha-bhumika Sutta, he asks his Brahmin questioner to imagine a physical situation:

“Suppose a man were to throw a large boulder into a deep lake of water, and a great crowd of people, gathering & congregating, would pray, praise, & circumambulate with their hands palm-to-palm over the heart [saying,] ‘Rise up, O boulder! Come floating up, O boulder! Come float to the shore, O boulder!’ What do you think: would that boulder — because of the prayers, praise, & circumambulation of that great crowd of people — rise up, come floating up, or come float to the shore?”

“No, Lord,” answered the Brahmin.

Just so, the Buddha then explained, is the situation with regard to kamma. Someone who lives badly, acts cruelly, takes what’s not given, fools around sexually, is deceitful and spiteful, gets drunk, and doesn’t see anything wrong with all that: such a person, on the breakup of his body after death, is destined for a unfortunate rebirth, no matter what anyone might wish or how sincerely they might pray that it turn out otherwise.

The way I’ve finally come to understand it is that the laws that govern actions in the material world and that underlie our understanding of that world are operative in the continuum of space and time in which the material world has its existence. That world is real, and the laws that operate within it are not to be influenced by wishes or prayers. Our belief that the material world is the only world that exists, however, is a delusion.

Just as real as the material world is the world of moral behavior, and the concept of kamma defines the laws that govern the dynamics of that world and help us to understand it. The universe explained by kammic lawfulness operates in a continuum of moral choices. Just as the continuum of space and time is defined in terms of such concepts as then and now, here and there, heavy and light, bright and dark, so the continuum of moral choice is defined in terms of similar pairs of concepts: good and evil, skillful and unskillful, wholesome and unwholesome.

That notion—that there are two separate continua, one of space/time, informed and shaped by the transfer of energy, and another of morality, informed and shaped by the tranfer of kammic influence—makes it possible for me to reconcile my faith in science with my faith in the Buddhadhamma. As a conscious being, I exist in both continua; in the first, my existence is transitory and unique; in the second, my existence extends backwards as far as I can imagine, and forward until my kammic influence has developed enough to bring an end to my ignorance and to my long wandering through samsara.

I’d like to close with a quotation from the Acintita Sutta in the Anguttara Nikaya, the chapter on the fours:

The Buddha delivered his first teaching after his Enlightenment to the five monks who had been his companions during his period of austerities. The setting was the Deer Park at Isipatana (the modern village of Sarnath), near Varanasi. This is the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta—the teaching that set in motion the Wheel of the Dhamma. It appears in Chapter 56 of the Samyutta Nikaya.

The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta is, to my mind, the single most important text in the history of mankind. I don’t know any other teaching that is so concise, so clear, so deep, so compelling, so complete, so coherent. Above all, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta is original. The Buddha himself, in the sutta, claims that the truths he discovered were “in regard to things unheard before”, and I don’t know of any teachings, in any tradition I have studied, that would lead me to dispute that claim.

The basic message of the sutta is simple; it consists of four connected truths.

• The first truth is that our lives are filled with stress, dissatisfaction, suffering—the constellation of negative experiences and emotions that are encompassed in the Pali word dukkha.
• The second truth is that dukkha is caused by craving—wanting what we don’t have or can’t have, wanting things to be otherwise than the way they are.
• The third truth is that if we can relinquish craving, eliminate it completely, with no residue left behind, then dukkha will end.
• The fourth truth is that the way to eliminate craving is to follow an eight-fold path, which is composed of right point of view, right purpose, right action, right speech, right livelihood, right diligence, right alertness, and right concentration.

The path that the Buddha lays out is described as the Middle Way—the way between pursuit of sensual pleasures and personal gratification on the one hand and the practice of severe and painful austerities on the other. The Middle Way, which the Buddha has realized and thereby become the Tathagata (the one who has gone that way), “gives rise to vision, gives rise to knowledge, which leads to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to nibbana.” The four truths that comprise the Middle Way are described as “noble” truths—truths which enoble those who see them clearly; truths the possession of which separates those of noble character and attainment from the “uninstructed worldlings”, caught up in the pursuit of sensual pleasure and the satisfaction of ambition.

There are three “technical” terms in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, i.e. terms that have particular significance to Buddhism and that cannot be adequately translated by a single word or phrase in English. These are dukkha, nibbana, and dhamma itself.

The easiest, perhaps, is dukkha. Various translators have used the words “pain”, “suffering”, “stress”, “dissatisfaction” (and many others) to translate dukkha. What makes dukkha a little easier than the other two terms is that it means all those things. To grasp dukkha, all we have to do is grasp the essence that relates all of the terms that different people have used to translate it. Just by doing that, our understanding of the world has been deepened, and we have a new lens through which to view our lot as humans, as sentient beings.

Dhamma is a little more difficult, because it not only has many different translations, but it does, in fact, have several different meanings in Pali. On the one hand, it is the way of the world (of the universe); it is the underpinning of the causal relationships between one event and the next, whether the events involve the settling of a cooling planet into an orbit around a star, the emergence of a new species in a changing environment, or the serenity with which a good woman approaches the end of her individual life. Dhamma is also used, usually in the plural, to refer to those things which are constant across time and space—subatomic particles and energy quanta in the physical world, perhaps, or bits of information; and, in our human lives, the aggregates themselves: form, feeling, perceptions, concepts, consciousness. In that second sense, dhammanah are contrasted with samskaya—composite things, conditioned things, things which are impermanent and marked by dukkha. Finally, Dhamma refers to the Buddha’s teachings, a use which takes meaning from both its first and second usages and extends that meaning to refer to a system of understanding and practice founded on the four noble truths. Which is where we started.

And where we end, if we realize those truths with direct knowledge as the Buddha did, is with nibbana, which is the most difficult term to translate, the most difficult to conceptualize, and, when one has caught the barest glimpse of what it might refer to, the most difficult to come to terms with. The word derives from a very ancient phrase referring to the extinguishing of a flame, and that is the simile which is most frequently found in Buddhist commentary on nibbana. But nibbana is not, as Western commentators have often interpreted it to be, a nihilistic concept. When the fuel that feeds the fires of desire, anger, and hurt is used up, then those fires are in fact extinguished, and the condition into which one enters—the one in whom those fires have been extinguished—is nibbana. I don’t know what that state is—the Buddha himself said that it is ineffable. But whatever it is, it does not burn. And one entering nibbana, although that one is released from craving and its attendant dukkha, and is no longer burned by the blazing heat of passion, jealousy, and hate, does not thereby disappear into blank nothingness. The Buddha, recall, entered the state of nibbana when he was 35 and continued his teaching for another 45 years, to the enormous benefit of those of us fortunate enough to hear that teaching, albeit imperfectly, across thousands of years and thousands of miles and an infinite number of infinitely nuanced differences between the Buddha’s language and ours, the Buddha’s culture and ours.

The five monks to whom the Buddha delivered his first sermon spoke his language, lived in his world, and had spent many years working to clear their minds—meditating, practicing austerities, discussing the dhamma with one another in an attempt to unravel it. They were ready to receive the Buddha’s message, and one of them, the Venerable Kondañña, did, in fact, get it right away: “Whatever is subject to coming into being,” he exclaimed, “is subject to ceasing to be.” And with that transfer of the knowledge and vision that the Buddha had gained through his exertions to Kondañña, Kondañña became enlightened, he saw what the Buddha had unveiled, and the Wheel of the Dhamma was set in motion. And once set in motion, “it cannot be stopped by any brahmin or ascetic or god, neither by Mara nor by Brahma, nor by anyone at all anywhere in the universe.”

There are a number of translations of the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta available on the web. There are three on the Access to Insight website, by
Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Piyadassi Thera, and Ñanamoli Thera.

And, on the Sutta Readings site, there is a fine recording of Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translation by Guy Armstrong, a guiding teacher at the Insight Meditation Society.

You can listen to Guy Armstrong’s reading by clicking on this link, or you can right-click to download the Mp3 file to your computer.

The text for our Dharma Study Group this coming Saturday is from the Anguttara Nikaya—the collection of the Buddha’s teachings that are arranged according to the number of topics covered in each. This one is from the Chapter on the Threes and concerns the three devaduta, the “messengers of the gods”.

This is how I’ve heard it. The Buddha was staying at the shelter provided by Anathapindika in Jeta’s grove near the village of Savatthi, and he told the monks this story…

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The Dalai Lama’s op-ed piece in this morning’s New York Times, “Our Faith in Science“, was truly remarkable: honest, clear-eyed, generous, and smart. It’s generated a lot of discussion.

In his blog Stranger Fruit, John M. Lynch remarks on the following quotation: “If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.” And he asks,

A number of friends, knowing my affection for the Buddha, and for the Dalai Lama, have mentioned the piece to me through this day, and they have all, to my mind, taken a subtly mistaken message from it; all of them told me that they read the piece to mean that there need be no conflict between science and religion; several went on to give it their own spin: if science could just give a little, then it could exist quite peacefully with religion.

As I read it, however, the piece says no such thing. True, His Holiness challenges scientists to widen their vision to include more of the world than their narrow speciaties, and to give more consideration than they have to the ethical implications of the science that they practice. And he does express his hope that “people from both worlds can have an intelligent discussion, one that has the power ultimately to generate a deeper understanding of challenges we face together in our interconnected world.”

But he is clearly mindful of the fact that “certain religious concepts conflict with scientific facts and principles.” What he does not say explicitly, but what is nonetheless true, is that those particular religious concepts that conflict with science are the concepts having to do with the role of God in the history of the universe and the conduct of human affairs. And while Buddhism very sensibly recognizes such concepts as “unskillful”, i.e. not worth talking about because they are unresolvable, most theistical religions (e.g. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) hold such concepts very close to the heart, and, indeed, have been known to destroy those (scientists and others) who fail to give them proper reverence and assent. The fact is that a belief in a creator God really is in conflict with science, and there’s no getting around that.

The Dalai Lama takes the same path that the Buddha took when he was confronted with such metaphysical questions as the nature of the gods; he attempts to bring the discussion back to what he calls “secular ethics”, i.e. “the principles we share as human beings: compassion, tolerance, consideration of others, the responsible use of knowledge and power. These principles transcend the barriers between religious believers and non-believers; they belong not to one faith, but to all faiths.”

Ideally, those principles do belong to all faiths. But the current state of affairs in most corners of the world—from the boulevards of Paris to the cornfields of Kansas, from the West Bank of the Jordan River to the West Wing of the White House—provide pretty unambiguous evidence that compassion and tolerance aren’t holding their own against the temper tantrums of a jealous God.

I love the Dalai Lama; I am amazed and grateful to have been alive in a time of the world when I can hear his teaching. I am glad to see that teaching appear on the pages of the New York Times; I hope that some will be touched by this wisdom who have not hitherto even been aware of such a luminous soul in our midst. But it will not do to read this piece carelessly, or to look for easy ways out of a difficult dilemma, or to conflate the Dalai Lama, because he is presented as a “religious leader”, with others who share nothing of his humanity, his breadth of learning, or his profound humility.

In his wonderful Buddhist blog, Wandering on the Way, Jeb has another excellent post, this one on “Why and How”. Jeb points out that these questions tend to get conflated: “Why is the sky blue?” is answered by an explanation involving the spectrum of sunlight and the differential absorbtion and refraction of light rays. But that is really an answer to a different question: “How is that the sky appears blue?”

Both science and religion are prone to such conflation, but religion does it more often, and to more disorienting effect. Jeff ends his essay by pointing out some differences between Christianity, which makes little distinction between “why” and “how”, and Buddhism, which pretty much ignores the former and focusses all its analytical attention on the “how” of experience.

We’re off to New York City on Sunday for a week of unstructured visiting, walking, museum-going, eating, and all the other fine things to do in Manhattan. Next weekend, our friends the Wilsons will come down from Rochester, and we’ll get together with John Morgan for our annual Blumberg-Morgan-Wilson weekend. We’ve been doing these BMW weekends for more than 30 years, and this will be the first without Claudia Morgan, who died in March. Claudia spent the last 12 years or so of her life wheelchair-bound; she was a victim (and I use that word deliberately; it is a cruel disease) of MS. Being with her, we had a chance to see close-up the many indignities visited upon those whose independence is qualified—still dependent on the designers of wheelchairs and the environments in which those roll.

So it was especially wonderful to read Jamais Cascio’s long story about the Kenguru car; he sees the Kenguru, which was designed by the Hungarian rehabilitative services company Rehab Rt., as an example of Long Tail manufacturing.

I see the car as an example of the Buddhist ideal of compassion. Walking with Claudia through Central Park (she loved the Gates; she entered her sharp decline shortly after that event), we were conscious of how easy it is to look over the head of someone in a wheelchair, to mentally edit her out of the picture, to be blind to her autonomous presence, to her Buddha-nature. One of the women tending the Gates, with their long poles with the tennis balls at the ends, came up to our group and ignored everyone but Claudia; kneeling down in front of her, the woman immediately engaged Claudia in a long and animated conversation; she had worked on every Christo project since the Running Fence, and she was delighted by Claudia’s enthusiasm for the Gates. We learned later, from someone who knew her, that the woman’s father had recently died after a long battle with MS.

She knew. She knew that there was a person in there; someone other than someone in a wheelchair. That sensibility—the awareness, looking at another, of someone in there, someone who cannot be looked past, or over, or around, someone with whom one can share, must share, the common fate—that is the essence of compassion, and it is, I must believe, what informed the design of this cute little car.

Here is what I’ve heard.

The Fortunate One, on this occasion, was travelling with a large group of monks when he arrived at the town of Kesaputta. The people of the Kalama clan who lived there had heard reports of the Buddha. “He is the ascetic Gotama,” they told one another, “the one who went forth from the Sakyan clan to the homeless life. It is said that he is the Fortunate One, a Buddha, fully enlightened, seeing the way and following it, getting it at every turn and getting it all, the only one able to tame those ready to be tamed, the teacher of gods and men, all-knowing, perfected. He has directly experienced this world, with its gods, its deceivers, its ultimate sources of being, and he shares that experience with everyone. He teaches a truth that is good in the beginning, good in the middle, good at the end, with all the right words and right emphases; his life is spirited, perfectly complete and pure. It is good to see such a one coming our way.”

Then the Kalamas approached the Fortunate One. Some of them paid homage to him and sat reverently to one side. Others exchanged greetings with him, talked cordially with him, and then sat down to one side. Still others saluted him with palms joined, then sat down to one side. And there were some who remained silent, watching him carefully, sitting to one side.[1] Then one among them questioned him, in this manner:

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Tony Evans covered the Dalai Lama’s address on compassion at the Wood River High School in Sun Valley. His Holiness discussed the probability that global warming was implicated in the increase in natural disasters. The next day, Evans used Google to see how the event had been covered and found 23 stories from as far away as Russia and Italy. None mentioned the global warming angle.

Evans points out that B-M has worked for the major oil companies for decades, and helped defeat Clinton-era legislation that would have controlled greenhouse gas emissions. And he asks, “Was BM’s client the Dalai Lama, or the U.S. State Department, which handled security for his visit?”

I’ve worked with a lot of public relations people and firms over the years—most of my career was in advertising and marketing communications—and I never got comfortable with the concept. When you produced an ad campaign, at least, the client—the money behind the story—was identified. With PR, it was too easy to slip one over on an unsuspecting public, to get a story out that kept the storyteller concealed behind the curtain, to dissemble. And that process has come to control so much of our public discourse that it’s difficult for anyone to speak sincerely and directly without being spun, especially when that person is speaking truth to power.

I’ve been busy.

I’ve hooked up with a group of folks in Cincinnati who are studying Buddhism, and we’ve organized ourselves as the Dharma Study Group. We’re reading and discussing the texts in the Pali Canon (the best collection in English translation is at the Access to Insight), and I’ve cobbled together a website to help us stay on track and focussed. I’m using TextPattern for the website, and so far, I’m impressed. It seems to be even more powerful than WordPress, which drives this blog, yet it’s pretty easy to understand and has a relatively intuitive UI for managing the site. Which is good, because the documentation, at this point in time, pretty much sucks. I’ll report back when I’ve had more experience with it.

I’ve also moved to a new hosting service, TextDrive, which is run by the same group of geeks responsible for creating TextPattern (note that TextPattern can run on just about any hosting service that offers PHP; it does not rely on any special capabilities of the TextDrive service). I’m not absolutely certain I did the smart thing here; the TextDrive servers are slow, compared to the SolidHost servers; the interface for managing the domains I have hosted there is plain and simple Webmin, as opposed to SolidHost’s elegant cPanel; and there have been several server crashes just in the few weeks I’ve had stuff on TextDrive. But their response has been excellent, their support smart and appropriate, and their drive to make it work is apparent. I think they will, and that I will be happy having made the switch. That said, I can’t recommend SolidHost too strongly; they’ve been a fantastic service and I’d go with them again in a heartbeat if I didn’t lust so foolishly and obsessively for geeky delights (e.g. Ruby, fastcgi installed, modPython installed, subversion, etc.)

I have seen some interesting stuff on the web over the past week, and I’ll compile a single portmanteau post to lay them all on you, sometime this evening or tomorrow. And, now that I’ve got dharmastudy.org up and running, I’m going to move back to the stuff I’ve been writing on belief; maybe a week or so on that.

The New York Times reports on a talk that the Dalai Lama gave to more than 35,000 people in Rutgers Stadium, where he received an honorary degree. Two of the Tibetan monks sitting in the stadium bleachers remembered the first time that he spoke to an audience in the New York region, more than 25 years ago. Just a few hundred heard him then.

More are hearing him today, and the message he delivers is one that we need to hear.

The “zen” explosion of the ’60’s and ’70’s was inspired by D.T. Suzuki’s presentation of zen as a discipline which could whack a seeker over the head with sudden insight—a direct route to experience unmediated by training, culture, intellect. Suzuki himself gets pretty fuzzy-minded, and his followers more so; their proselytizing led to what Chris Locke calls “the sanctimonious narcissism of the New Age”. Whatever the roots of zen might have been, by the time it reached the tennis court and the board room, and came to inform the art of motorcyle maintenance, the Buddha had pretty much disappeared from the scene.

This time around, the Buddhism is more traditional, rooted in the Buddha’s own teaching of the Dharma. That’s not mystical—not even “spiritual”, whatever that over-burdened term might mean. It’s practical stuff, leading us to an understanding of how our actions have consequences, and how we might train our minds so that our actions generate good consequences. It’s not fuzzy minded at all, but simple and real. Attachment on the one hand. Compassion on the the other. We get to choose. We have to choose.

It gives you goose bumps.

(Thanks to David Weinberger for the link to Chris Locke’s blog.)