I finally found a quotation I’d been looking for since I was in India. There were scriptures on the walls of Birla Mandir in Delhi, but no photography or bags allowed inside, so I couldn’t take a picture of the one that struck me or write it down.
There the sun does not shine, nor the moon and the stars; There lightning does not shine, of the common fire need we speak! Him alone, as he shines, do all things reflect; this whole world radiates with his light. –Mundaka Upanishad
It’s a little more theistic than Buddhism, but I like it. Maybe it’s because it reminds me of Torei Zenji’s Bodhisattva Vow:
When I look deeply into the real form of the universe, everything reveals the mysterious truth of the Tathagata. This truth never fails: in every moment and in every place things can’t help but shine with this light. Realizing this, our ancestors gave reverent care to animals, birds, and all beings. Realizing this, we ourselves know that our daily food, clothing and shelter are the warm body and beating heart of the Buddha. How can we be ungrateful to anyone or anything? Even though someone may be a fool, we can be compassionate. If someone turns against us, speaking ill of us and treating us bitterly, it’s best to bow down: this is the Buddha appearing to us, finding ways to free us from our own attachments– the very ones that have made us suffer again and again and again. Now on each flash of thought a lotus flower blooms, and on each flower: a Buddha. The light of the Tathagata appears before us, soaking into our feet. May we share this mind with all beings so that we and the world together may grow in wisdom
I just submitted a proposal for Ignite Detroit. It’s an interesting format for a fast-paced presentation, and whether or not I’m presenting, I’d be fascinated to see what people come up with, and will of course report here if I go.
We were about three hours into the Buddha’s Enlightenment sitting–a retreat that starts at 8 PM and ends at 4 AM, commemorating Buddha’s awakening under the Bodhi tree in Bodhgaya–when I experienced my ironic reversal.
Beginning meditators sometimes think they’ll stop feeling resistance after a few months, maybe a few years. But it really never goes completely away. In the middle of a retreat, doing sitting periods of about 30 minutes with periodic breaks to stretch, I find myself getting expectedly sore and uncomfortable. Observing my thoughts arise and letting them go, I still find that one recurring thought is, “How soon until that bell rings? How soon until I get a break? Come on, like, now!”
But then every once in a while I have a sitting where I get into the zone, and when the bell rings, my mind goes “NO! Not yet! I was in the zone! I could totally do ten more minutes!” That’s what happened around 11 PM on Friday.
It led me to an insight, and I’m worried it will sound too pithy here. I examined my own relationship with preferences, and noticed: I assume that my preferences have some influence on reality. I assume that if reality doesn’t bend to my preferences, something must be wrong. And the insight is that reality has never bent to my preferences, will never bend to my preferences, really can’t be bothered with my preferences. In reality, 30 minutes is 30 minutes, regardless of whether I’d prefer it to be longer or shorter.
Our preferences might be the most immediate mental force we have, and so it stands to reason that we assume they have some power. Some people even sell trashy self-help books that suggest if you stick really hard to your preferences, if you really picture reality becoming exactly the reality you’d prefer, then it’s all going to line up.
There are big problems with this if you stop and look at it. Problem #1 is that despite being immediate and demanding, our preferences are also unstable. At 8 PM, I decided that I’d prefer being at a Buddhist retreat to being at a movie theater or a bar or at home. By 11 PM, I was thinking maybe I’d prefer something else. This problem is compounded when we meddle with our own hindsight. If in June you decide you’d prefer to be married then by October think you’d prefer to be single, you might talk yourself into believing that you never really wanted to be married in the first place. So we’re bound to be unsatisfied if we expect reality to bend on cue for us, especially when we keep changing the cues.
Problem #2 is that we think that preferring alone is enough to do the job, when sometimes preferring isn’t even enough to break through our own junk. If I strongly want to be a professional singer/artist/athlete/whatever, but that doesn’t motivate me to practice… how can my preference bend reality when it can’t even bend my own habits? If I’d prefer for a publisher to love my book enough to sell it in every Barnes & Noble in the country, then I have to believe in my book to get it to every publisher who might consider it. The strength of my preferences makes me think that preferring is enough–that my wishes will come true if I wish them hard enough.
Problem #3 is that we’re actually–at this time and place in history–more likely to have our preferences humored than any time before. If you have air conditioning and heating, you have something that bends to your preferences in the way that most humans throughout history could only dream of. But does that give us the illusion that our own ideal reality is attainable–that if it’s not here today, it will surely be here tomorrow?
We have preferences, and they exist, and we acknowledge them. We just know, through meditation, that we’re searching for reality. We can’t let preferences get in the way of that.
Tweeting the Animatronic Swami.. Enjoy!
So I promised at the end of the last post I’d tell you my best Buddhist book for the year; thinking over the problematic triple-genre of Buddhist books made it clear that one of them succeeded at all three tasks in interesting ways.
Brad Warner’s book Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate surprised me. In part, because it didn’t seem to be as controversial as his other books. Maybe I missed something. But it was his most radical statement on the way Buddhist practice shaped his life–and best of all, it works in surprising ways. As I referred in the last post, sometimes the Buddhist narrative seems like Amazing Grace with the subject changed: “Amazing Dharma, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” Wretchedness to sweetness.
Warner’s story takes surprising turns and we see that he didn’t let all the wretchedness go, and he knows it. It’s not about being saved by Buddhism; it’s about letting go of the belief that a change in belief will make everything perfect. As a memoir, it’s a rewarding read.
As an argument, it’s extremely thought-provoking. I don’t agree with all of Warner’s conclusions, but I’m glad he’s working with the question. He pulls back the cover a little on Buddhist organizations and shows that, even in communities that are searching for enlightenment, there are still politics, and still interpersonal wrangling, and that’s not going to go away. His vision for the future of Buddhist organizations is well considered, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in practice over the coming years.
So, the last questions is whether it’s a helpful book. It’s not trying to be a self-help book exactly, and someone looking for checklists on ethical or meditation practice will probably do best to look elsewhere. But perhaps it’s helpful to take Warner’s worldview seriously, not for his sake but for your own sake. It’s a how-to guide for people who have started to get overwhelmed by the “-ism” of Buddhism–the organizations, the businesses, the magazines, the Tibetan craft shops, and the charismatic smiling teachers who bring them all together. The “Buddh-” part, if it’s working, will help us see through the “-ism,” and by unveiling many of his own flaws and struggles, Warner paints a better picture for us.
So that’s my vote: Best Buddhist Book (I read) is Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate by Brad Warner.
Of course, I think a lot about Buddhist books. Duh. Looking over my list of books read in 2009, I see nine explicity Buddhist books, four others that would count as “religious studies,” seven that deal with Buddhism to some extent, and one written by someone I met at a Buddhist temple. And I’m trying to put together a plan for another book, one that I’d hope to see on the “Buddhism” shelf of your local megabookstore for so long.
Publishing is a business (as four other books on that list were wise to remind me) so I’ve been looking at the business side of it. We can lament this or cover our eyes and say “A good book is a good book,” but the truth is, some books sell and some books don’t, and it’s probably good mental practice to observe which ones do and which ones don’t.
What’s interesting about “Buddhist books” as a genre is that they’re at a strange point of overlap between the broader genres we see in the publishing industry. There are three areas in particular:
It’s a juggling act. I think I’ve been tempted to stress the second part. I think Buddhist writings should help people. Some Buddhist books (I’m not naming names here) seem to stress the memoir and argument; I feel like summing them up as, “Here’s my story: I found Buddhism, and it helped me so much and made me happy and now I’m so happy!” Maybe someone gets something good out of them, but they leave me a little cold. It also makes me question the memoir–as you do with any memories–because it often seems the story must be simplified to reinforce the simple point, “Yay Buddhism.”
The problem with emphasizing the self-help aspect is that it can make the book seem preachy. Also, for better or worse, book buyers are most swayed by what rhetoricians call “appeal to ethos,” or what literary agents call “platform.” Basically, this means reputation. People considering buying a self-help book are more likely to buy from names they recognize; barring that, they look for cues that a writer has a position to give help. Which doesn’t bode well for a first-time writer.
Then I think of Turtle Feet, the last book I read in the year. It is purely a memoir of a former Buddhist monk. It’s funny, surprising, suspenseful–yet I wonder if it belongs on the “memoir” shelf alone. I’d be curious to have someone with no background in Buddhism read it and ask, did you get an understanding from this book of what Buddhism is? And then I’d ask a perhaps unanswerable question: Does this book help you live better?
It’s a threefold burden that other books seem exempt from. When we read a self-help book like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, we don’t want to hear the writer’s story. When we read a good memoir like one by David Sedaris, we don’t think too much about whether he has an argumentative point, or whether reading it will help us live better.
So Buddhist writing is tricky, but when it’s done well, it’s successful three times over. Tomorrow, I’ll post my choice for the one Buddhist book I read in 2009 that, in hindsight, did all three jobs excellently.
For the first time, I kept track of all the books I read in one year. There’s some observation bias at work; I sometimes made it a point to finish a book on principle when otherwise I would have moved on, and I think I read fewer anthologies and the like, because bits and pieces of a book wouldn’t count for the rules I made up for this silly little list. But here are the books, trivial or profound, for scholarship or entertainment, those I sought out and those I stumbled upon in closeout bins. Not all are necessarily recommended, but I’d be happy to talk about any of them if you’re curious. Linked to Google Books.
Bring Me the Rhinoceros, John Tarrant Connect, Web Worker Daily A Buddhist in the Classroom, Sid Brown Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate, Brad Warner The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, Andre Comte-Sponville The Thief and the Dogs, Naguib Mahfouz The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right, Robert Lanham Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, Kim Addonizio The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, Jennifer 8 Lee X Saves the World, Jeff Gordinier Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World, Mary Pipher Get Known Before the Book Deal, Christina Katz The Maharishi Effect, Geoff Gilpin How to Work a Room, Susan RoAne Joyful Wisdom, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, John McWhorter The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, Alan S. Miller, Satoshi Kanazawa The Glass-Maker’s Daughter, V. Briceland The Living Buddha: An Interpretive Biography, Daisaku Ikeda The Raft Is Not the Shore: Conversations toward a Buddhist-Christian Awareness, Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan Three Mistakes of My Life, Chetan Bhagat The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change, Gurcharan Das Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, Jane Mayer Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, Bich Minh Nguyen Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writer’s Guide Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe, Greg Epstein How to Make Friends and Oppress People, Vic Darkwood Libyrinth, Pearl North Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist – One Woman’s Spiritual Journey, Jan Willis Turtle Feet, Nikolai Grozni
