The Times Quotidian

Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
by Guy Zimmerman

Reading Stephen Batchelor’s Confession of a Buddhist Atheist is likely to have an irreversible impact on your image of the historical Buddha. Far from a demi-god who woke up one day beneath the Bodhi tree and lived out his life in an alternate universe defined by bliss and ease, Batchelor’s earthy and forceful Siddhattha Gotama exists within a Shakespearean landscape defined by passionate treachery and high political intrigue. While Batchelor takes pains to present this figure as one of many legitimate pictures of the Buddha, the picture he paints couldn’t be more bracing.

Toward the end of Confession, for example, Batchelor tells of an old king who, when visiting Gotama, hands his sword and turban to his military commander and enters the sage’s hut alone. Inside, Gotama listens as the king laments his dwindling capacity to generate fear, let alone respect, in his subjects. Out loud the king wonders how Gotama has managed to preserve his own authority so successfully. At the end of the meeting the old king steps out of the hut and is dismayed to discover that his general has absconded with the insignia of royalty. Instantly, he sees that the visit was a diversion set up by his son, whom the general is now en route to coronate. As the defeated old monarch rides away, Gotama knows the new king will now attack his homeland, taking revenge on the population for a deep and long-simmering humiliation. He travels out and sits beneath a tree on the border of the country. When the new king approaches at the head of his army, Gotama persuades him to turn back. Before long, however, the troops return – the king has ordered them to invade the land and slaughter every man, woman and child.

The old monarch in the story is King Pasenadi, who ruled the kingdom of Kosala in the Ganges Plain of Central India some twenty-five hundred years ago. His son, the new king, is Vidhudaba, and the land he will invade with murder in his heart is Sakiya, home of Siddhattha Gotama, the Buddha Sakyamuni. For forty years, Pasenadi has been Gotama’s main patron and protector, and because of his demise the remaining few years of Gotama’s life were marked by an elevated state of uncertainty. This is just one of many remarkable narratives Batchelor has patiently brought to light out of the vast archive of early Buddhist texts called the Pali Canon* (See Note), narratives that force a grounding reassessment of what it means to practice the dharma.

An iconoclast and polemicist, Batchelor has earned his authority on contemporary practice the hard way. A monk first in the Gelug lineage of Tibetan Buddhism and then in the tradition of Korean Zen (where he met his wife Martine, herself an accomplished practitioner), Batchelor’s understanding of the dharma stacks up against anyone’s. He also writes extremely well. His first book, Alone with Others, was rooted equally in Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. The Awakening of the West came next, followed by the hugely influential Buddhism Without Belief.. Batchelor’s 1998 translation of Nagarjuna’s Verses from the Center presented the 5th century Mayahana teacher as a poet, while his Living with the Devil traced the parallels between the figure of Mara in Buddhism and that of Satan in the West. In addition to his work as an author, Batchelor is an accomplished photographer. He is, in short, a very impressive gentleman.

I heard Batchelor read from Confession recently. We were at Against the Stream, the dharma center on Melrose Avenue in East Hollywood founded by Dharma Punx author Noah Levine. Levine presents the dharma as a rebellion against the forces of greed, hatred and delusion, so Against the Stream felt like an appropriate setting for Batchelor. Seated on a small dais at the front of the room, he read a few passages from Confession and then took questions from the crowd. Batchelor almost visibly winced as these questions centered on issues of reincarnation and karma that he views as completely unfruitful avenues of inquiry. Batchelor is unflinching in his advocacy of an empirical approach to practice, stripped of belief. And the Confession is in part an effort to separate out those teachings that were unique to Gotama, such as “this-conditionality,” from the common cultural traditions of his day.

Reading Batchelor brought home how my own subtle idealizations of Shakyamuni Buddha have been driven by secret longings to become invulnerable to harm. It is through the space opened by admiration, I sense, that certain “gaining” ideas can infiltrate one’s practice. Instead of a total critique of normative modes of living, the dharma then begins to devolve into a smile button pinned to the lapel of a spurious identity, the vain self-image of being someone on the path to “enlightenment.” Reading Confession helps re-energize the practice of dharma as an effort to radically transform the ground of experience. Seeing Gotama so deeply engaged with the radical contingency of his time and place underscores how dogma will not help us – we must engage with experience breath by breath.

Confession also contains an extended meditation on the blessings and pitfalls of religious institutions. Without institutions, religions disappear…but institutions inevitably distort the insights and practices they exist to convey. On this level Confession does for Buddhism what Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels did for Christianity. Exploring recently unearthed gospels by renegade apostles such as Thomas and Phillip (and even Mary Magdalene herself), Pagels radically altered our sense of the actual teachings of Jesus. In a similar way Batchelor ponders the effects on Gotama’s teachings of the struggle after his death between the authoritarian Kassapa and the dreamy Ananda. While Kassapa may have compromised the subtleties of the teaching, he also helped to ensure we can experience the dharma today.

The tension between the dogma and practice is always challenging because language itself is part of the problem. The experience of presence is immediate and ephemeral; any attempt to depict it becomes distorted by the crudeness of words. The linguistic “forms” we deploy to describe the experience of dharma begin to do what all forms do, which is to persist and draw energy, replicate and spread taking, finally, institutional form. Seen in this way the issue of enduring institutions on the one hand versus the immediacy of practice on the other falls under the rubric of “the middle way.” The challenge is to hold both ends of this spectrum balanced in the mind at one time. Our problem can be viewed as a root imbalance or bias in the direction of the “form” end of the spectrum. Using the language of modern science, we tilt toward the left-brain, with its strong ego-based linearity, over the connective right brain. Gotama then becomes a pioneer in a necessary rebalancing, a forerunner of the kind of human being we must all become if the species is to continue to thrive.

If Batchelor at times seems overly harsh in his assessment of the traditions that formed his sensibility, it is perhaps to provoke an important question: where do the impulses of orthodoxy and hierarchy lurk within the emergent culture of Western dharma? Already, no doubt, such retrograde forces are exerting their distorting effects. And yet one of Batchelor’s themes is how elastic the dharma is, able to adapt to radically diverse cultural settings, and resistant over the long haul to all efforts to co-opt its transformative power. This elasticity is rooted, perhaps, in the dharma’s capacity to activate the remarkable gifts of practitioners like Mr. Batchelor himself.

*Note on Batchelor’s translation

For the confirmed dharma-geek, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist includes an account of how Batchelor managed to track small threads of biographical narrative hidden in the vast Pali Canon. Crucial to his ability to do this is A Dictionary of Pali Proper Names, first published in 1938. Running itself to 1,370 pages, this massive index allowed Batchelor to follow accounts, for example, of King Pasenadi, cross-referencing for accuracy and detail. Batchelor is translating this primary source material himself, giving even more weight to his portrait of the man Siddhattha Gotama.

Photography and the Dream of Form, Part 1: Batchelor
By Guy Zimmerman

Contrary to popular belief, machines, technology, do not exist to enslave us, or to limit or retard our spiritual growth. Rather, technology exists to liberate us from Cartesian habits of mind so that we can embody hitherto undernourished aspects of our potential for awareness. To see what I mean, examine the photograph to the right on your screen.

The meat in the image is red but probably it’s flowers instead of meat and just a little out of focus such that it appears meat-like. What’s in focus must be water, but since water is transparent you can’t actually see it. The shadow of three fingers and a thumb that interrupt the cool stripe of reflected light is in focus so, yes, probably there is water, and the flowers that look meat-like float just below the surface of the water. Actually, in the lower of the two cool stripes of light you can see the rest of the hand and the arm it is attached to, so definitely the red material is not meat at all, though it still might not be flowers. Whatever it is you can’t turn away because the image is delicious to the eye. There are those rich, blendy colors and the invisible water, and the general sense of stealing a moment from the past and savoring it now because why not?

In another image we’re on a boat looking through a window into a dining room which itself includes three windows framing a view of water far below. Very faint and in the distance, there’s a darker line of land. But actually, we’re high enough above the water so it couldn’t possibly be a boat at all. Probably it’s simply a restaurant on a promontory above a sea or river, the Loire river perhaps, given the title of the photograph: “Val de Loire.” As before, this otherwise unremarkable subject matter is complicated by intervening layers of reflection and transparency, which serve to elevate it toward the sublime. It’s the kind of scene we enter and leave several times a day without noticing the complex yet quiet harmony.

The hull of a caved-in boat, an empty hallway, a drinking glass – the variety of subject matter is as striking as the consistency of the photographer’s concerns. The scenes are busy enough to embody the full chaos of experience while also resolving toward a provisional order. In each case poetic effects are created through optical refraction, reflection and transparency. These are photographs that revel in the continual flux of visual experience, celebrating complexity. And yet despite the weave of surfaces, each image manages to record a unified event of light and moment. They are the product of someone with extraordinary powers of attention, and their aim is to undercut reductive tendencies of mind by seeding doubt, provoking always the question: what is this?

To gain clarity on what the photographer is up to, we can view each of these photographs as embodying five distinct properties or factors. First, each photograph represents a moment of contact between a specific visual field and the light sensitive emulsion in the camera. Next, each image is imbued with a singular, distinctive feeling tone. Third, each photograph represents an act of discernment, meaning that the mechanism of the camera has been constructed (and then deployed by the photographer) to convey a world that makes sense spatially to our eyes. These photographs each embody an act of attention – the photographer has focused his lens on a specific frame chosen out of all the possible frames in that time and place. Finally, each photograph represents an act of intention – to celebrate the beauty of an image and offer it to others. These five qualities – contact, feeling tone, discernment, attention and intention – are referred to in Buddhist arcana as the nama-rupa (name-form) factors. They are five qualities that are present in each moment of consciousness, and what little I know about them I learned from an audio taped lecture by the writer and teacher Stephen Batchelor, who also happens to be the man who took the photographs I now write about.

Batchelor is an iconoclast who has practiced extensively in both Tibetan and Korean Zen. Remaining strongly independent, he is one of the most eloquent proponents of a distinctly agnostic approach to Buddhism that emphasizes secular and pragmatic aspects of practice. In beautifully written books such as Alone with Others, The Awakening of the West, the remarkable gem called Buddhism Without Belief, Living with the Devil and also a translation of Nagarjuna’s Verses from the Center, Batchelor “engages in a critical exploration of Buddhism’s role in the modern world.” His work as an artist is fully in this mode, and it’s the trajectory of his career that I appreciate most. Under the influence of a transformative practice we see an articulate sensibility simplifying out into wonder.

It’s the third of the nama-rupa elements, discernment, that I think Batchelor wants most to put pressure on with his photography. His photographs hold us right at the moment where the mind casts its lot with a hard-and-fast interpretation of sense data presented by the visual field. The jaws of the mental apparatus are kept open for a moment. We do not hurtle forward from an interpretation open to revision to a solid belief on which the girders of the self can be firmly planted in its endless campaign for a separate, unchanging and solid existence. The camera, that mechanism of certainty, is here used to undermine confining delusions that constrict our lives, causing us to suffer unnecessarily.

Part of the reason the camera is able to do this kind of thing so effectively is that we understand it to offer an “objective” take on the world. With a painted image the issue is obscured by the more direct engagement with another subjectivity. In photography the question of whether or not we are reading the image correctly comes immediately to the fore. The technology of the camera is doing the “discernment” work our eye-brain typically does, and this allows us to step back from the mechanical tendencies that narrow and limit our own minds. In so doing, Batchelor’s photographs remind us of the gorgeous strangeness of the world we inhabit, and which we are too conditioned in habits of perception to savor appropriately.

Aesthetically, the result of all this is something called beauty. The photographs are moments of presence in which the covert and fleeting harmony of the everyday world moved Batchelor to raise the camera-mechanism and press the button. They are moments of union between the luminous world and a perceiver of that world delivered with mystery intact. The presence is contagious, communicative, the images drawing us closer to our heartbeats and to the ongoing miracle of perception.

“Unmistaken Child”, a film by Nati Baratz
by Rita Valencia

“…May I clearly perceive all experiences to be as insubstantial as the dream fabric of the night…”
From a Tibetan Buddhist prayer

“Unmistaken Child” is about a mythic search for a Tulku: the reincarnation of Geshe Lama Konchog, a venerated teacher who is viewed by his contemporaries as a meditator on par with Milarepa, and who, like Milarepa, had practiced and lived in retreat in several caves in the Tsum Valley, a very remote region of Nepal bordering Tibet. The man who is invested with carrying out the search is the Lama’s heart disciple of 21 years, Tenzin Zopa. Tenzin is a fresh-faced,  youthful man, with an easy smile and intelligent eyes. His search makes for a fascinating story, full of intimate and charmingly everyday scenes, intercut with stunning shots of  dramatic mountain peaks with clouds sweeping over them and lush, untraveled valleys.

The first act of the film is dated with a card which reads October 21, 2001. After we are introduced to Tenzin, we witness a funeral ritual complete with shots of the dead Lama, monks gathering around the pyre of  the cremated Lama. The monks can detect a footprint which points to the north–although it is impossible for the viewer to make out anything but the faintest of marks in the bed of ashes. The search for the Lama’s reincarnation begins here; Tenzin is designated as the person who will be conducting the search a few scenes later. The task is illustrated in detail: we watch as Tenzin draws a sketch of the mountainous skyline to the north–where the footprint pointed, to help in a divination that will result in a clearer idea of the whereabouts of a possible incarnation. He wraps the completed sketch in a yellow silk kerchief and sends it off to an astrologer, Lobsam Jamyang of the Heruka Center in Taiwan. We see the astrologer’s response in a videotape. Tenzin and Lama Lhundrup (head lama at the Kopan monastery) watch the tape on a funky little TV set, with wonder and glee, as the astrologer works out his divination and comes up with clues as to who might be the Tulku (incarnation) and where this child might live. I must pause here to comment that there is a very sophisticated international internet presence of Tibetan Buddhists, and Tenzin is a highly educated monk who would no doubt be capable of snapping a digital photo and emailing it to the astrologer–one wonders whether this primitive form of communication is simply theater. But more on this later.

Tenzin then sets off on his journey, by helicopter to a remote village in the stunningly beautiful and unspoiled Tsum Valley, and then onward on foot, with only a backpack…and of course a small film crew trailing behind.  Tenzin, and the filmmaker, scrupulously maintain that this is not a task that even a devout practitioner can take lightly.  It is not as if a person raised as a monk has some sort of inborn certitude about a supernatural event. “Only a Buddha can know another Buddha”, Tenzin frets, worrying that he is not up to the task of identifying the Tulku. “We cannot judge a being higher than our own state.” The great masters who are able to choose their reincarnations are conveyors of a history of spiritual accomplishment that is simply moved from one body to the next without the obstacle of self. But ordinary practitioners, even highly trained and sincere ones such as Tenzin Zopa, have not yet transcended self or the delusions that arise from it.

“Unmistaken Child” is very careful to highlight moments of humanness that his Western audience will be able to relate to: the little Tulku crying as his head is shaved, the sadness and reluctance of his parents in giving up the child, Tenzin’s moments of self-doubt, his obvious grief and love for his master, the innocence and sincerity of the people from the remote regions where the child is sought. Even in this very unspoiled valley where there is little influence of the secularized world, faith is not a given. “We see no children with any interest in the teachings”, says one of the farmers when Tenzin asks if any of the current crop of toddlers seems “unusual”.

As his story unfolds, the filmmaker is exquisitely quiet about his own opinion of the proceedings, and he builds this narrative with great craft and restraint, well aware that he will be presenting this film to a world where disparagement, intolerance, even ridicule, of the faithful is ubiquitous. Clearly Baratz has a loving and respectful attitude towards Tibetan Buddhism, and takes a personal interest in showing this tradition in a good light. He makes this claim in his press releases and other statements, while saying that he wasn’t sure he believed in reincarnation; and clearly he has studied and practiced himself. However, the respect and love that a talented filmmaker has for his subject has led to a certain factual over-manipulation.

In a very systematic way, from the middle of the film, the plot continuously shifts between earthly scene to magical scene, happy scene to sad scene, up until the end. It was important for me to keep the audience emotionally and thematically challenged, thus encourage them to contemplate rather than just experience. This style was also inspired from Buddha’s teachings. Buddha asked his disciples not to believe anything he says, but to check everything themselves.    —Nati Baratz‘ words, from his press materials

The film is graced with travel photography that is sumptuous, and a charming and likable main subject–certainly, not all Tibetan lamas are the type to dance around with flowers in their ears as Tenzin does. However, as the narrative plot points ticked by with such remarkable precision, I became curious about this film.

Documentary is a difficult form to give such precise shape. I admired Baratz’ verite style of storytelling, and understood how it is necessary to cut hours and hours of footage into a coherent story, but this was just a bit too well-structured. I became suspicious, especially on the third viewing, where I stopped on a scene at the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala in which Tenzin Zopa is appointed to the mission to conduct his search by Dagri Rinpoche. I listened to the dialogue without paying attention to subtitles, and closely watched the performances of the actors. It was, unmistakably, set up. This observation led me to further exploration of the incarnation story, and within a few clicks of my Google search I found this:
http://www.fpmt.org/teachers/konchog/tenzin.asp…and suddenly found that I was in the world of Rashomon.

It is a letter written by Ven. Tenzin Zopa to the senior Rinpoche, Kyabje Lama Thupten Zopa Rinpoche, telling his own story of the reincarnation discovery process. The account jumps around in time a bit, but  it is very comprehensive and gives a pretty clear picture of the circumstances surrounding the death of the Lama, and finding the Tulku. It includes many facts based on conversations that Tenzin had with other Lamas who were close to Lama Konchog, and his own conversations and experiences with his master that he had not felt free to disclose until after the Tulku was confirmed. Even excluding facts of which Baratz may have genuinely been unaware at the time he made this film, there are some major and significant discrepancies between Tenzin’s account and Baratz’s retelling.

Before even addressing Tenzin’s document, the questions begin with the time frame. By Baratz’ own account, he and his wife spent a month at the Kopan monastery. This occurred, according to him in the year 2002. He and his wife had traveled to this remote region to learn more about Buddhism and to research a different project, with no idea of the reincarnation project on which he was about to embark. During the course of his stay, he met Ven. Tenzin Zopa, who asked for him to pray for his recently deceased Lama Konchog to be reincarnated.

The Lama had passed away on the 21 of October 2001. Obviously, since the filmmaker was not present for this event, he had to patch a funeral together from a few ceremonies. Geshe Lama Konchog’s funeral would have had to have taken place before Baratz had even arrived in Nepal, (but certainly after the date that was identified in the title card) as such high lamas are left untouched for some time. Reconstructions are commonplace in documentaries but to place the main character in a scene and make it appear to be “real” is a questionable practice. Hopefully this is a question that will be cleared up before this film is completely accepted as truly a documentary and not a docudrama.

We are given to believe that the astrologer’s divination, the footprint found after cremation and the direction of smoke from the funeral pyre offered the only clues to the whereabouts of the Tulku. In fact, others close to the Lama provided convincing hints. Tenzin’s words:

In the beginning of 2003…I returned to Sera Je University and went to pay respects to my teacher, the ex-abbot of Sera Je University, Khensur Losang Tsering Rinpoche. We had a serious conversation on the late great mahasiddha Geshe Lama Konchog’s life and reincarnation. Khensur Rinpoche made an observation and said it is 100% sure that the Great Mahasiddha’s reincarnation already exists. Then I asked where Khensur Rinpoche thinks He is now? Rinpoche replied, “In my observation He seems to have taken rebirth in the place where Geshe La meditated in the past 25 years.” [Tenzin knows this to be Tsum Valley, where as a child he came to know Lama Konchog.]

— The Incarnation of Geshe Lama Konchog Tulku Tenzin Phuntsok Rinpoche.
Letter from Ven Tenzin Zopa to Kyabje Lama Thupten Zopa Rinpoche about the search for the reincarnation, And the miraculous signs around the events. July 31 2005

Furthermore, the truth of Lama Konchog’s  and Tenzin’s relationship with the Tulku’s family is misrepresented. Tulku Tenzin Phuntsok Rinpoche is in fact, the nephew of Tenzin Zopa. The marriage between Tenzin’s brother and sister-in-law had been match-made by Lama Konchog. Lama Konchog knew Apey (the Tulku’s father and Tenzin Zopa’s brother) very well. In the days before his death, Lama Konchog had requested a special offering of food from Apey, which Apey fullfilled. Baratz makes it appear that the family of the Tulku is completely unknown to Tenzin, and that he is searching with little to go on but the astrologer clues of a couple of letters (TS) from the name of the area where the Tulku is to be found and the first letter  of the father’s name (A). We even have a scene in which Tenzin, weeks into his trek through the valley, meets a couple of aunts he appears not to have seen in years, and asks the women if they are aware of any children aged 1 to 2. From these women he hears of a man named “Ahpe”(sic) with two sons in a nearby village. We are left with the impression that Tenzin has no idea who the family is that he is going to meet. Are we to believe that the scene in which he meets his nephew–seemingly for the first time–is authentic, or is it staged as well? There is no indication that Tenzin has any familial ties with the boy, and we are left with the impression that the family is simply incredibly open and trusting with a stranger in their home, even allowing him to sleep with the child soon after winning their trust. Are we supposed to think that these are exotic mountain people who are so innocent and deeply trusting of wandering monks that they let them take their kids to bed?

Granted, there would be little narrative tension to a story where the subject has a hunch that the reincarnation of his venerated teacher, with strong roots to the village of his birth and to his family, is actually his nephew. Why disclose these pestering little factoids and ruin a good story? According to his own account, Tenzin Zopa himself did not reveal all the evidence that he possessed until the Tulku had been confirmed, in order not to taint the confirmation process. It is impossible to know how much Baratz did know and chose to keep hidden. For once a couple of basic facts are altered or relevant details excluded to this extent, the filmmaker’s credibility suffers, and it calls into question the overall authenticity of this work.

Now the question becomes, when does a film cease to be a documentary? How much subjectivity and impressionism does documentary allow? This is a form which is used to build argument, to present evidence, and generally to portray subject matter in a factual way. Here the subject matter is both ordinary human stuff and the supernatural. Does the nature of the mythical search change the rules of  documentary reportage simply because it is unprovable by Western laws of evidence? Would cleaving to a more factual approach have left us with a film that taints its subject matter with too rationalist and legalistic a perspective?

In fairness to Baratz, he chose a challenging subject. It is difficult to approach the question of faith (even though Buddhism is not a theistic religion, faith is central to its practice). Intellectual and rational tools don’t work to explain faith. In fact, what does it mean, to “approach the question?” Is faith a question to be approached? When you question your faith, are you questioning the truth of what you came to believe, or your own resolve in believing it? Is faith the enemy of scientific process and rationalism? Is faith a means to freedom? Or it is simply a form of delusion which gives comfort to the ignorant and a means of control to religious orthodoxies?  Is faith a “right brain” stepchild only to be kicked out of the house by its burlier rational sibling in the “left brain”? Are we to take the experiences of oneness and transcendence, gifts of some soon to be half-explained processes of neural synapses, as figments of an imagination driven by the desire to escape the mundane, the miserable, the banal? Are we to accept that these are holy visions of a world inhabited by invisible ones of manifold names, shared by men and women who have pioneered the way into these realms and handed down genuine–albeit extraordinary—accounts of their experiences? Or are we to go the ultimate distance and ourselves apply for residence in these realms?

When a film is staring down issues such as these, perhaps one can grant some leeway to an obviously skillful director, sit back, and relax as the story unwinds.  But then do some investigation, as the Buddha instructs.  While this film is worth admiring for its limpid style and great beauty, it should receive no more bogus “documentary” awards. It seems that the subject matter demands and deserves more honesty, not pleasing

I became first drawn to the the Fire Sermon (Adittapariyaya-sutta) when reading Aldous Huxley’s Perrenial Philosophy’s chapter on Good and Evil. I went looking to penetrate and quantify the nature of these moral opposites and found instead a rousing poetic call to action. The sensuality of the dialectic, the simple audacity of the conclusive “Birth is exhausted…” make this a powerful and seductive read.

The Fire Sermon
Adittapariyaya-sutta

Thus I have heard. The blessed One was once living at Gayasia in Gaya with a thousand bhikkhus. There he addressed the bhikkhus:

‘Bhikkhus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning?

‘Bhikkhus, the eye is burning, visible forms are burning, visual conciousness is burning, visual impression is burning, also what ever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the visual impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion; I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despair.

‘The ear is burning, sounds are burning, auditory consciousness is burning, auditory impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the auditory impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust….

‘The nose is burning, odours are burning, olfactory consciousness is burning, olfactory impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the auditory impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust….

‘The tongue is burning, flavours are burning, gustative consciousness is burning, gustative impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the auditory impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust….

‘The body is burning, tangible things are burning, tactile consciousness is burning, tactile impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the auditory impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust….

‘The mind is burning, mental objects, (ideas, etc.) are burning, mental consciousness is burning, mental impression is burning, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the auditory impression, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the first of hate, with the fire of delusion; I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.

‘Bhikkhus, a learned and noble disciple, who sees (things) thus, becomes dispassionate with regard to the eye, becomes dispassionate with regard to visible forms, becomes dispassionate with regard to the visual consciousness, becomes dispassionate with regard to visual impression, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of the vusal impression, with regard to that too he becomes dispassionate. He becomes dispassionate with regard to the ear, with regard to sounds…He becomes dispassionate with regard to the nose…with regard to odours…He becomes dispassionate with regard to tongue…with regard to flavours…He becomes dispassionate with regard to mental objects, (ideas, etc.), becomes dispassionate with regard to mental consciousness, becomes dispassionate with regards to mental impression, also whatever sensation, pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, arises on account of mental impressions, with regard to that too he becomes dispassionate.

‘Being dispassionate, he becomes detached; through detachment he is liberated. When liberated there is knowledge that he is liberated. And he knows: Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived, what has to be done is done, there is no more left to be done on this account.’

This the Blessed One said. The bhikkhus were gald, and they rejoiced at his words.

While this expostion was being delivered, the minds of those thousand bikkhus were liberated from impurites, without attachment.

(Samyutta-nikaya, XXXV, 28)

Translated by Walpola Rahula for “What the Buddha Taught”, expanded 1974 editition, from the original Pali if the Samyutta-nikaya of the Sutta-pitaka.

These are the Dharma Family cats. Zen to the core. Who is watching the store, after all?

An Introduction to the Dharma Family

Ed Wortz was my friend and mentor. He ushered me through some bad times and was there to toast me when the sun was shinning bright. Thich Thien An was Ed’s mentor and initiator in Buddhist philosophy. Ed and Thien-An first met the Ven. Dr. Thich Thien-An when Thien-An came to Southern California in the summer of 1966 as an exchange professor at UCLA. Thien-An’s father had been one of the monks who self immolated to bring attention to the world of the horrors being perpetrated in Vietnam by the Diem regime. When Saigon fell in 1975, Ven. Thien-An saw his responsibility and helped the boat people and other refugees from his homeland. Thus, the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles, the first Vietnamese temple in the U.S, came to be.

For Ed, Thien-An was the real thing. He studied Zen meditation with Thien-An and conscripted this Buddhist training as part of his psychotherapy practice. “Good Luck, Bad Luck” is a favorite parable that Ed used to tell. How true it is.

Thien-An’s Story: Good Luck, Bad Luck?
This story, a favorite of Thien An, and one that I’ve told to many clients and groups, is set in a valley in ancient China. The inhabitants of this valley were very poor. Each year none of them managed to store away more than just enough grain and other food stuff to make it through the winter. One of the families consisted of just a farmer, his wife and son, and they each worked very hard just to maintain this subsistence level. One night, at harvest time a herd of wild horses found an opening in a fence and broke into this family’s field. They ate much of the grain and trampled and ruined a lot of what they didn’t eat. The next morning the family was really bummed out about this turn of events and neighbors added to mood by saying things such as; “Oh my!” “you poor people”, “what will you do”, “we all have so little to eat and there is none to spare!” ,”we have our own mouths to feed”, thank the gods this didn’t happen to me”, “we can’t be of much help to you”, “You will certainly starve to death this winter”, “we cant imagine what awful deeds you must have done in your past lives to warrant such an awful fate!”

The farmer shook his head and said “It really does look bad but good luck or bad luck you never know!”

The next day the farmer and his son were working in the fields trying to recover what they could when the herd of wild horses, lured by their memories of the good grain, came back into the field. Well the farmer and his son, seeing this, hastily put up the fence rails and effectively corralled the entire herd.

The family was of course delighted. And the neighbors, hearing of their good fortune, came by and said: “what lucky people you are”, we thought that certainly you were going to die this coming winter”, “this is the most amazing turn of events in our memory”, “you have certainly beaten the fates”, “now you are the most wealthy family in the entire valley”, we can’t imagine what wonderful deeds you must have done in countless past lives to deserve such a reversal of fortune”.

The farmer listened to them all, shook his head and said again, “well good luck – bad luck you never know”.

The farmer and his son, being good business men, decided to break the horses before they took them to market and thus make a larger sum. The son was riding the wild horses, in an attempt to gentle them, when the horse he was on, reared into the air, fell over on his side and crushed the young man’s leg. The damaged leg was so bad that it had to be amputated.

Well, when the neighbors heard of this additional turn of events they were truly concerned and distraught. They came to the farmers house and offered their condolences “You unfortunate man”, “What a truly terrible thing to have happen”, “your only son”! Who will take care of you in your old age”, “we can’t even begin to imagine the awful things you must have done in countless past lives to have your apparent good fortune marred by this truly catastrophic event”.

The farmer said in response to their concerns, “It really seems like a tragedy but good luck – bad luck you never know”.

Well, hardly a month passed before young man was up on his one leg with a crutch serving for the second when the army of the Khan came through the valley and took away all the young men, never to return, except one.

So good luck – bad luck you never know.

Personally in my own life it seems to take me at least ten years or even longer to assess the significance of major life events. – Ed Wortz

Desire is the first datum of our conciousness; we are born into sympathy and antipathy, wishing and willing. Unconciously at first, then conciously we evaluate: “This is good, that is bad.” And a little later we discover obligation. “This being good, ought to be done; that being bad, ought not to be done.” – Aldous Huxley

I return repeatedly to Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. It is a comprehensive compendium of metaphysical thought. It investigates topics ranging from, “Personality, Sanctity, Divne Incarnation” to “Good and Evil” to “Time and Eternity” to “Faith” and “Suffering”. Excerpts from authors include Eckhart, William Law, Chuang Tzu, The Bhagavad Gita, Maitrayana Upanishad, Kabir, Rumi and St. John of the Cross. All of us, who put time aside to contemplate the relationship between Atman, “the personal self”, and Brahman, “the universal Self”, will profit from these readings. In Chapter 1 “That Art Thou” Huxley opens with these words:

“IN STUDYING the Perennial Philosophy we can begin either at the bottom, with practice and morality; or at the top, with a consideration of metaphysical truths; or, finally in the middle, at the focal point where the mind and matter, action and thought have their meeting place in human psychology.”