I’m planning my fall classes, and one of the books I’ve planned for the Wireless World class is James Paul Gee’s book on video games and literacy. I’m curious what my students will think about it. It’s an accessible topic that I think they’ll be eager to discuss; however, the writing style of the book is definitely academic. It’s a style I’m very comfortable reading, but one that students are likely to find dense and confusing.

And yet, I am curious and eager to talk to students about it, because it’s an interesting way to act out the processes in the book. When you start playing a complex video game, you need to learn a new “language,” in a sense. It’s designed to be a little puzzling, because that reminds you to pay attention. Video games are fun because they’re challenging to learn. The same thing, I think, can be true of a piece of writing that uses challenging vocabulary and structure. You can get a sense of accomplishment from it, but only after overcoming the sense of frustration you feel at the early levels.

Consider how we learn to use a new gizmo after we open the box. Some of us will dig for the instruction book and make sure we’ve read every page so we know what we’re supposed to do with it. Others will start pressing buttons. The only other option is a non-option: after poking slightly at one or the other way to learn about it, we’ll give up and the gizmo will sit unused.

Really, these are the simplest ways we can respond to any learning situation. We can try to inherit the knowledge, unearth the knowledge, or abandon the knowledge. So a student is reading a book for class and notices an unfamiliar word that the writer seems to be using a lot. The student can reach for a dictionary and try to inherit the knowledge. This would be the same case if they asked someone else to explain it, or tried to find a simplified summary of the book. The student can also take a guess at the meaning of the word, then read forward with that guess in mind. Each new use of the word either confirms what the student thinks it might mean, or contradicts it, so the student might have to go back and re-read with another guess in mind. Or they can give up.

There are benefits to both kinds of honest attempts. I think sometimes we rely too much on inherited learning. We want to know what the outcome is going to be before we try. Of course, we need both, especially with the range of situations. I wouldn’t want a world where pilots-in-training get no book learning, just the opportunity to try and see what works and what crashes. But I also wouldn’t want a world where nobody learns from experience.

But perhaps we rely too much on inherited learning when trying to develop Buddhist practices. I know people who read a lot of books about meditation and the Buddhist traditions in the world, trying to perfect the concept of Buddhism before they’re willing to test out the teachings for themselves. We need to risk a little, to take some steps that might be failures, in order to really learn.

But first, a story from Toledo. Ohio, not Spain.

The department of creative writing was taking a visiting poet to dinner at a middle-eastern restaurant called Beirut. The dinner was arranged by one of our professors, Sharona Ben-Tov Muir, and right now I can’t remember the visiting poet. Sharona had just completed a book of poems about her father, who had designed weapons for the Israeli army. She’d reserved a smaller table, thinking few of the grad students would show up, but when we all showed up to the restaurant and waited outside, she went to the managers to request a table for twenty. She came back and ushered us all in. “It was no problem,” she said. “They’re nice Arab gentlemen.”

A few years after that, I began teaching in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest concentration of Arab-Americans. I hear Arabic spoken among groups of teenagers in the student union, take roll in classes where Zainab is as common a name as Jennifer, decide between pizza and falafel in the food court. As banal as the word “nice” is, I have to agree with Sharona: Arabs are nice people.

Of course, any characteristic of a diverse group of people has exceptions. That’s what diversity is. There are Arabs who are sort of jerks. Also there are Arabs who are not Muslims and Muslims who are not Arabs.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear that Sharona and the manager of Beirut Restaurant had a certain cooperative rapport. They both live on American soil, both with a long history in a foreign land. Together they can recognize that the wars in their homelands haven’t been good for either of them, that there’s no sense in harboring animosity or directing it at peaceful civilians in America. They have common ground; they’re in it together.

When I’ve seen the debate over the Cordoba House–the proposed Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan–I wonder how unusual my life experience is. A sentence caught me off-guard in Stephen Prothero’s (generally excellent) book God Is Not One: “Most Europeans and North Americans have never met a Muslim, so for them Islam begins in the imagination, more specifically in that corner of the imagination colonized by fear.” I paused when I read that and asked, “Really”? There’s no citation for it in the book, and in my experience it’s a little rare that I go out in Detroit or Dearborn and don’t meet a Muslim or two. You might as well have told me “Most Americans have never seen a sunflower” or “Most Americans have never met a person wearing glasses.”

But it may be right. Maybe Detroit is just that strange. I still can’t fathom, though, making an argument against building an Islamic center on the basis of knowing Muslims through their characterization on 24 rather than talking to them. Some of the arguments against building the mosque are arguments of extent–”too soon,” they say. But in the words of Morrissey, how soon is now? At what point will people stop associating an entire demographic group with their isolated members’ most abject act? Seven years? Twenty years? Fifty years? They say the space in Manhattan is “sacred ground,” but (a) it was a Burlington Coat Factory and (b) what better place for prayer and worship than sacred ground?

As a Buddhist, I know that Islam is not particularly close to my viewpoint and practice. But that doesn’t matter; we’re in this together. I recognize that 9/11 was horrible for all of us. Think of it from the perspective of a mainstream American Muslim: you see an act of terror unfolding in your own country. You’re shocked and appalled. Then some wackjob from Afghanistan shows up on your TV, telling you that he just won a great victory for your people, that you should be proud of what he did. But you don’t feel proud. People in your own country start treating you like an outsider, even more than before. You fear that you’ll get blamed for acts you didn’t do, acts you don’t approve of, acts that your family left another country to escape.

I know it’s a white people cliche to defend a position by saying “Some of my best friends are…” And I’d probably be overstating the case if I claimed “best friends”–I meet Muslims on a regular basis but I can’t say I have any on speed-dial. However, I think we miss the significance of “friends” if we don’t use them to become wiser. So I won’t defend myself or any ignorant views by claiming to have Muslim friends, but I will say that because I have Muslim friends, I want to help them prosper and be happy. When I imagine who will worship in the Cordoba House if and when it is finished, I imagine the people I know in Dearborn, the families, the students, some liberal, some conservative, some speaking English at home, some speaking other languages. Just like America.

In debates about Muslim issues, when we distinguish between mainstream American Muslims and the radical fringe, sometimes people will defend conflating the two, saying, “Why don’t mainstream Muslims stand up and denounce radical terrorism?”

But again, my experience leaves me feeling puzzled about this. Because the mainstream Muslims I meet do denounce terrorism. Have you ever asked a Muslim what they think about terrorism? Why don’t you?

The defense continues, “Why don’t we see mainstream Muslims denouncing terrorism in the news?” I always wonder if this argument is claiming that mainstream Muslims should take a TV news station hostage and force them to report their denouncement of terrorism. News stations report what they want to report, and if it bleeds, it leads, so you might see more violent Muslims than peaceful Muslims on the news. And yet… I don’t watch a whole lot of TV news, but off the top of my head I can remember two times seeing an American Muslim telling a reporter that they do not support terrorism, one in an interview with Barbara Walters and the other with Jon Stewart.

All of us need to improve our skills at listening to each other. Instead of assuming what American Muslims want, we should take time to listen, and be present for the real people who are here with us, rather than the phantoms we see in our nightmares.

Once upon a time, I had friends on the Internet. It seemed the cultural consensus at the time was that this was kind of a nerdy thing to do, a sign that you didn’t have enough fulfillment in your “real life” that you had to seek out invisible friends in “cyberspace.”

I had a conversation last night at a Meetup/Tweetup/Mashup and I realized how much this has changed. We don’t talk about “cyberspace” anymore as if there’s a separate “real life.” When a small portion of the public were Internet users, I would have one group from that set of “Internet friends” and another group of “real life friend.” And the RL friends would often poke a little fun at me and ask why I would think of someone I’d never met as a friend.

But I think I was always a little bit aware that the distinction wasn’t so sharp. The potential for shallowness of Internet friendship was also present in other friendships. I started college as a theatre major; groups of people working on plays together would develop remarkably intense friendships, as night after night they stepped into the roles of lovers or family. Then, after the play was over, we’d swear we’d be friends forever. A year later, we’d forget each other’s names. If this was how “real world” friendship worked, I didn’t see why any other friendship would be real or fake. I dropped my theatre major and became a literature major, studying great people who expressed themselves through writing. Why couldn’t true friendship grow out of writing?

This division has largely disappeared from my life, and maybe from life in general. There are no longer two distinct sets of people, or two distinct types of activities. in short:

1. Almost all of my “in-person” friends have become connected to my Internet sphere. I can’t think of the last time I participated in a friendly activity that wasn’t organized, to some extent, through social media.

2. “Online friends” haven’t stayed online friends; even those few I haven’t met in person are as tied to my in-person network as anyone else is.

Every friendship begins somewhere, but in the past we’ve over-estimated the importance of that beginning point. We ask couples “Where did you meet?” as if that interaction essentially defines everything that comes after it. So the old way of thinking would say the fruit of a friendship that germinated with “She sat next to me in Poli-Sci” or “He worked in the office across the hall” is essentially different from one that germinated with MySpace. The friends I make through the Buddhist temple aren’t limited to discussion of Buddhism, and likewise, the friends I make online aren’t limited to become anything else.

But then at these tweetups and meetings of the Detroit International Social Meetup (you should totally join us if you’re in Detroit) I have a set of friends that I made at in-person meetings that I found online. They aren’t online friends who’ve become real, as in, “We chatted so much online that we finally had to meet in person.” They’re also not in-person friends that I got to know well before deciding to trust them in my online network.

Being a person means being both a mind and a body. A rich interaction with someone comes from sharing the mental/rhetorical/expressive side of things as well as sharing physical space and resources. There are no longer two sets of friends, one for conceptual discussion and one for personal activities. I’m glad I don’t have to choose.

Like many people, I’m disappointed and discouraged by the news stories about Shirley Sherrod’s forced resignation over remarks posted by conservative bloggers out of context. I worry that we’re learning not to listen to each other; rather than making the effort to pay attention to another person’s viewpoint, we habitually seek through their words to find significant ammunition to be angry about, words that we can blame them for, and if that takes selective misreading, many of us are way too willing to do so.

As a writing teacher, I ask my students to explore a topic in depth, to rethink their thoughts through writing. I believe that the writing of educated adults can and should show complexity. In my classes, I call this “specify and subordinate.” Rather than a stand “pro” or “con,” when you use “specify and subordinate” you demonstrate a specific extent on the spectrum between them. To do this, we have to create an awareness of how a logical person could believe the opposing side. It means saying things like, “I’m not saying that X; however, Y.” or “If it is true that X–and I’m not sure it is–then Y.”

When I heard the edited version of Sherrod’s remarks, I felt it was clear that she was establishing a background to lead up to a greater point. She was talking about her first reaction to a situation, her habitual response, as a strategy to lead to the revelation that her habitual response turned out to be wrong. She was going to talk about a learning experience.

As a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, I cultivate habits through meditation that attempt to cut through the habitual responses. I’ve seen, through inward reflection, the many ways that my previous responses have been short-sighted and ignorant. To understand these lessons and explain them to others, sometimes I need more than a sound-bite. I need to be able to convey in depth, “I used to believe X, but now I believe Y.” That relies on someone listening to the beginning, middle and end of my message.

I worry that the case of Shirley Sherrod will scare people away from that kind of honest introspection. People will be afraid to say on the record, “I used to believe X” because the “X” can be taken out of context, presented as a complete sentence, ridiculed and admitted as evidence. Instead of learning from our mistakes and talking about the ways we’ve learned from our mistakes, we’re going to plow forward with the idea that we’ve never made mistakes, that our reasoning has never been faulty.

And instead of paying attention to people who see things differently, to truly understand what mistakes they have made and how they learn from their mistakes, we’ll only look for ways to prove them wrong.

I truly hope we can create a better world than that.

The book I’m reading now, Teaching Writing Online by Scott Warnock, is probably not particularly interesting to anyone who’s not, well, teaching online writing classes. But it does make me think of something relating to most of what we do online.

One of the tricks in an online class is to make sure it’s not an individual channel for each student; that the students are aware of the opportunities to learn from each other, and to prove themselves to each other, not just the teacher. He has some specific ideas I’m definitely going to use in the fall.

And maybe this is a good way to think of all our leadership roles–teaching Buddhism, organizing communities, blogging, publishing. The goal to promote your own viewpoint and control the experience, but to facilitate people’s ability to learn from each other. As technology makes more networking possible, there will be more and more knowledge spread through the infrastructure–but more need for leaders who can guide and encourage healthy peer-to-peer sharing.

And maybe this is another way to think of the Buddha–not as an idol we have to revere, but as the one who brought together the Sangha, the community of Buddhists, and the teachings we receive from one another are as important as the source.

It might seem like personal writing and researched writing are two separate things. When I am writing, you might tell me, people want my thoughts, not Wikipedia’s. Except I find that research goes hand in hand with this kind of writing. Rather than shutting my Internet off, calling it a distraction and hammering through writing without it, I find it helps to sharpen my writing against the things I find, to use the Internet as a springboard to move my writing forward. Sure, sometimes I get distracted. But the wandering is part of the journey.

So with that in mind, here’s a list of things I’ve searched for in the process of writing a new book, tentatively entitled The Whitest Buddhist U Know. It’s not a done book–I’ll be revising, and who knows what might happen to it as I submit it to the mercy of editors. But maybe the research list will provide some enlightenment, or at least, entertainment. Behind the jump…

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It’s a short piece (see it online here) and not particularly deep, but a good introduction to Pema Chodron’s viewpoint for a typical Sunday-night-network-news audience. It’s nothing too surprising if you’ve read her books.

What is surprising is that it’s part of a series on interviews with “self-help” experts and writers, and that the piece specifically contrasts Buddhist thought to other self-help methods touting “the power of positive thinking.” They contrast it to a clip from “The Secret,” and highlight Chodron’s claim that happiness comes from embracing negative emotions rather than suppressing them.

The things I find interesting, and encouraging about this:

1. Mainstream media is looking at Buddhism now and trying to figure out specifically what it is–which involves looking at what it is not.
2. People are seeing that there’s another way into Buddhism. Rather than saying, “Buddhism is great because it says exactly what I’ve always believed,” they’re seeing the possibility that Buddhism is the antidote to what they’ve always believed.
3. The reputation of the shallow, materialistic New Age philosophy exemplified by The Secret seems to have gone way downhill. The news media is promoting Chodron by saying that she’s nothing like that.

All of these are good signs, in my opinion.

I’m working on a book that is, among other things, about my travels last year. Here’s a rough draft of a chapter from it that I think stands well alone. Enjoy

I hadn’t planned to travel to Nalanda and Rajgir by car. I’d been asking around Bodhgaya for bus options, but when Ali at the Hotel Tokyo Vihar heard about it, he said it was a bad idea. “There are bandits,” he said. The roads of Bihar are known for a kind of lawlessness, it’s true. I’d read the book Rude Awakenings by Ajahn Sucitto and Nick Scott, a story of a Buddhist pilgrimage that fell apart when the two men were robbed in Bihar–actually, on the exact road that I would be traveling between Bodhgaya and Rajgir. That’s why I ended up hiring Ali to drive me to Rajgir.

The land of Bihar is mostly flat, but there are a few dramatic hills and small mountains punctuating the horizon. I watch them go by from the window of Ali’s car. We listen to Bollywood music as we drive; Ali has a few collections of current Bollywood hits, and he switched the CD a few times.

One of these mountains is Vulture Peak. The scriptures tell us that Shakyamuni Buddha delivered some of his most pivotal teachings on Vulture Peak, including the Heart Sutra and the Lotus Sutra. It’s a major pilgrimage point for Japanese Buddhists of the Nichiren sect for that reason.

It’s also in the poorest state in India, Bihar. This state has been known as the wild frontier of India for a while, though the lawlessness has subsided in recent years. Still, I’m aware. While my dad was afraid I’d die at the border of Pakistan, I was afraid I’d die in Bihar. But I’m relatively safe. Ali is friendly, but soft-spoken, quiet by nature. It’s actually a comforting presence, being in the car with him, like I don’t feel the need to fill up the air with chat. We’re just enjoying a ride together.

As much as I’m afraid of Bihar’s reputation, there’s also a deep love I feel for the place. I remember talking to Vineet back in Delhi, hearing his pride in calling Bihar his home state, the history and opportunity for greatness. There is a sign in Bodhgaya that says, “We walk on ground where Buddha walked. Wherever you go in the world, say it with pride: I AM BIHARI.” I take the sign’s advice and say it with pride, pile it on to the list of things I say with pride: I am Nebraskan, I am American, I am Detroit, I am Canadian, I am Bihari.

We reach the foot of Vulture Peak, get out of the car and buy tickets for the ropeway. I’ve been on ropeways before, in Haridwar, but this is different. The Haridwar ropeway had carriages for six people. The carriage would arrive and stop, and people would file in. Then the door would be secured, and the tram would move on.

This ropeway was just a chair lift. The single chairs are constantly moving, and passengers must stand where the chair will scoop them up. We wait in line behind a large Indian family. Their teenage daughter is nervous. She steps to the line with the incoming chair, then jumps away at the last minute. They coach her in Hindi, but she still doesn’t want to get on the chair. Three empty chairs pass her before she gets the nerve to get on one. The rest of her family follows.

I step up. I’m determined not to make a nervous spectacle of myself. The chair pulls in, and I am ready. I hop on and it lifts me off my feet. As I make the steady climb, I reach for the latch that’s supposed to safely (or semi-safely) belt me into the seat.

I only find a broken hinge, a bent piece of metal where the latch should be. I glance at the chairs coming down; they all have solid bars against their seats.

Ali’s in the chair coming up behind me. I turn to him, and he smiles and waves. He doesn’t know that I’m in peril. But it’s a peril against a stunning landscape, like a James Bond movie, so I decide I need pictures. Still, at each moment I look down, I make a quick mental calculation. If I fell right here, I might get caught by that bush and not hurt too much. If I fell from here, I’d die. It’s not too far right now; I could cut my losses and take a fall right here.

To be honest, I’m probably not in much danger at all. The chair remains relatively upright, I have both feet on a rest and bars to hold onto if the ride gets bumpy.

But that doesn’t stop my imagination from running away with me. I’m going to die. Here in Bihar. Here on my way up Vulture Peak. Without seeing the Shanti Stupa. I’m never going to see America again. But then I get a sense of peace. If I die here, I die on ground where Buddha walked. Maybe I’ll be reborn here in Bihar. There are worse things that could happen.

Of course, I reach the top of the lift in one piece. There are a few steps to go up to the stupa.

Just below the stupa, there’s a field of gravel. Dozens of people are milling around in the gravel, drawing designs, moving gravel into little piles. I see a word written in the sand: AMERICA. I wonder who wrote it. Perhaps a pilgrim like me scratched it there, wishing for blessings for his homeland. Or perhaps it was written by a Bihari university student, hoping the Bodhisattva of Compassion would help him get an immigrant visa, a job at GM, a house in the suburbs of Detroit. To me it’s a reminder: this is your home.

The case for believing that all religions are the same often is supported by the claim that all major religions teach the Golden Rule. However, I think it’s notable there are differences in the way this Golden Rule is phrased. Some phrase it as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and some phrase it as a compound negative–”Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.”

The interesting correlation I see is that religions with a positive Golden Rule tend to be proselytizing religions. “I am glad that I was converted; therefore, I should try to convert others.” Religions with a negative Golden Rule tend to be non-proselytizing. “I wouldn’t like it if someone tried to convert me away, so I shouldn’t try to convert others away from their religions.”

The only anomaly in this case (with the versions taken from here) is Jainism, which is a non-proselytizing religion that has a positive Golden Rule.

As I said in my previous post, what’s interesting about different religions is the differences in what they say about compassion. If someone is on the wrong path, to what extent is it compassionate to correct them, and to what extent is it compassionate to let them be? The different religions of the world, and their differences, ensure that we’ll keep looking at this issue. We won’t all come to the same answer, and that’s for the best.

I’m devoting my June to a bigger writing project, so my updates here will be even more sporadic than usual, and perhaps out-of-context bits of what I’m writing. Hey, if you haven’t, check out the funky essays I wrote for Monkey Goggles. But for now, a fragment that surprisingly came out in my writing today.

The story of Hui-neng is one of the most famous ones in Chinese Buddhism. Zen master Hung-jen, the Fifth Patriarch of Zen announced that anyone who would be considered heir to his position should write a poem on the wall of the monastery. Everyone thought Shen-hsiu, his most esteemed follower, would succeed at this. Shen-hsiu was the most educated, had appeared as a guest on a handful of talk shows, and had a nice little fan club. He carefully thought through which one of his greatest hits he’d write to seal the deal.

He wrote a poem, and it wasn’t bad. It was like the kind of thing Buddhist-inclined office workers can put on their Buddhist-quote-a-day calendars to read during their coffee breaks and feel inspired. Shen-hsiu knew what worked, and he went there.

One illiterate monk, Hui-neng, heard about the poem, and realized it was incomplete and pithy. Sure, it was pretty much true, and not a horrible thing to say, but Hui-neng had a response, being present for this moment, that came directly from his own insight. He asked a friend to write a follow-up poem on the wall.

Seeing the follow-up poem, the Zen master knew it came from Hui-neng, and that it demonstrated deeper wisdom. He called Hui-neng to a private meeting, and declared him the Sixth Patriarch–then told him to run, because Shen-hsiu’s fan club would rip him apart.

Luckily, we don’t live in feudal China anymore. We live on the Internet, where the dissenting voices are merely subject to being told they are worse than Hitler. If Hui-neng were here today, I think he might keep a blog. He might call out the Dharma celebrities whenever they’re full of crap–which, let’s face it, we all are sometimes.