It's probably because I know I'll be far away this time next year, but I'm 
all over the Spring this year. Here's the view out my window in Brooklyn.
all over the Spring this year. Here's the view out my window in Brooklyn.Saturday, April 19, 2014
Friday, April 18, 2014
Motion sickness
I was the lone faculty member at a "teach-in" this evening on social justice and The New School; the organizer asked me because she's heard me go on about New School history. The turn-out wasn't great, the "Social Justice Hub" on the fifth floor of the new University Center turns out to be a difficult place to do things (ambient noise, people passing through, etc.), and I had to leave early (to see the Dance students' senior show). But what I saw was extremely thought-provoking.
Three examples:
-- A Psychology PhD candidate described his disillusionment with the school's failure to live up to the diverse and engaged image it projects in a powerful image of his own: students come in expecting the school to function as a kind of trampoline, allowing them to be more effective activists in the larger world as a result of what they learn, but it turns out to be more like quicksand. I'm sure most institutions disappoint in one way or another but something in the particular promise The New School makes (the promise, among other things, not to be like most institutions) makes its failures worse.
-- an MFA Drama student criticized "method acting" workshops, in which students are expected to delve into very personal and traumatic experiences, for not being "safe spaces." No structures exist to help people respond to what was shared, individually or collectively; her own experiences as a lesbian of color were not welcomed, and produced poisonous "microaggressions" in response. This raises fascinating and disturbing questions about much modern performance practice, which asks participants to take personal risks but doesn't really take into account the different levels of risk different participants already take just to be, and to be in a space in which they are already feel unsafe.
-- in response to the organizer's plaint that she'd spent four years without "doing anything" beyond organizing at New School, an NSPE student asked what we all thought counted as "doing." The discussion (which I had to leave halfway through) was all about whether the university itself is an appropriate venue for doing- something a Health Educator said was clear in most other universities but, because of The New School's strange self-understanding, not so much here...
I wish more people had been there to hear this; these are profound questions, worth wrestling with at every level.
Three examples:
-- A Psychology PhD candidate described his disillusionment with the school's failure to live up to the diverse and engaged image it projects in a powerful image of his own: students come in expecting the school to function as a kind of trampoline, allowing them to be more effective activists in the larger world as a result of what they learn, but it turns out to be more like quicksand. I'm sure most institutions disappoint in one way or another but something in the particular promise The New School makes (the promise, among other things, not to be like most institutions) makes its failures worse.
-- an MFA Drama student criticized "method acting" workshops, in which students are expected to delve into very personal and traumatic experiences, for not being "safe spaces." No structures exist to help people respond to what was shared, individually or collectively; her own experiences as a lesbian of color were not welcomed, and produced poisonous "microaggressions" in response. This raises fascinating and disturbing questions about much modern performance practice, which asks participants to take personal risks but doesn't really take into account the different levels of risk different participants already take just to be, and to be in a space in which they are already feel unsafe.
-- in response to the organizer's plaint that she'd spent four years without "doing anything" beyond organizing at New School, an NSPE student asked what we all thought counted as "doing." The discussion (which I had to leave halfway through) was all about whether the university itself is an appropriate venue for doing- something a Health Educator said was clear in most other universities but, because of The New School's strange self-understanding, not so much here...
I wish more people had been there to hear this; these are profound questions, worth wrestling with at every level.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
中文
Not everyone from the first trimester was able to stay on. Honduran Nelson and Chinese Indonesian Christian have conflicts with their emerging work schedules, and Mexican Enrique has disappeared too, presumably for the same reason. (9:15-12:15 Tuesday and Thursday would mix poorly with most work schedules; I'm lucky my teaching and service this semester is Mondays, Wednesdays, and the afternoons of Tuesdays and Thursdays!) With Euro-American Andrew and Korean Juhee staying on and a new student (Matthew, a Cantonese Australian) we might just be four. No complaints from me: Even more intensive - and still strikingly international!
Spring explosion
My friend M posted this picture of the trees blooming on his street in Park Slope. Sometimes Spring looks and feels like a chain of fireworks!
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Treetop experience
I'm having such a good time this year watching the treetops in the Lang courtyard step into Spring - wonders you'd never imagine from below.
Behold the red bundles which recently exploded like fireworks! Now they are giving birth to the little green seed paddles with which they'll soon helicopter to the ground. Almost as if an afterthought, the actual leaves emerge from the top as from a flower bud - leaves which will fill the courtyard with cooling green for the next half year and then go out in a sustained blaze of color, a return to red. Red-in-green-in-red!
Incidentally, today's session of "Buddhism and Modern Thought" was devoted to Thich Nhat Hanh. Students read his poem "Please call me by my true names" and the elaboration of the Precepts he calls the Five Mindfulnesses, and watched most of the documentary "Colors of Compassion." We also ate a tangerine - something we did last class, as well. On Monday I read aloud his description, and distributed it to students to reread again before class today, but this time we mindfully ate our tangerines in silence. In part, Thich Nhat Hanh observes:
A person who practices mindfulness can see things in the tangerine that others are unable to see. An aware person can see the tangerine tree, the tangerine blossom in the spring, the sunlight and rain which nourished the tangerine. Looking deeply, one can see ten thousand things which have made the tangerine possible. Looking at a tangerine, a person who practices awareness can see all the wonders of the universe and how all things interact with one another.
I can't report on the fruit of others' tangerining. I didn't get the ten thousand things but - having noticed that the Sunkist Smiles© clementines were from California - I did get the inland California sun, the migrant farm workers who work in the orchards, the water almost certainly from the Colorado, and the desert areas where the Colorado also, though ever more weakly, flows. And then, with the final section, a final burst of sweetness, interwoven with all this difficulty, which recalled lines from the poem:
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Behold the red bundles which recently exploded like fireworks! Now they are giving birth to the little green seed paddles with which they'll soon helicopter to the ground. Almost as if an afterthought, the actual leaves emerge from the top as from a flower bud - leaves which will fill the courtyard with cooling green for the next half year and then go out in a sustained blaze of color, a return to red. Red-in-green-in-red!Incidentally, today's session of "Buddhism and Modern Thought" was devoted to Thich Nhat Hanh. Students read his poem "Please call me by my true names" and the elaboration of the Precepts he calls the Five Mindfulnesses, and watched most of the documentary "Colors of Compassion." We also ate a tangerine - something we did last class, as well. On Monday I read aloud his description, and distributed it to students to reread again before class today, but this time we mindfully ate our tangerines in silence. In part, Thich Nhat Hanh observes:
A person who practices mindfulness can see things in the tangerine that others are unable to see. An aware person can see the tangerine tree, the tangerine blossom in the spring, the sunlight and rain which nourished the tangerine. Looking deeply, one can see ten thousand things which have made the tangerine possible. Looking at a tangerine, a person who practices awareness can see all the wonders of the universe and how all things interact with one another.
I can't report on the fruit of others' tangerining. I didn't get the ten thousand things but - having noticed that the Sunkist Smiles© clementines were from California - I did get the inland California sun, the migrant farm workers who work in the orchards, the water almost certainly from the Colorado, and the desert areas where the Colorado also, though ever more weakly, flows. And then, with the final section, a final burst of sweetness, interwoven with all this difficulty, which recalled lines from the poem:
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Theory of religion
I had the great pleasure (and honor) of being invited to an orthodox family Passover Seder last night. Twenty-one people, ranging from two to well over eighty years of age, along a long narrow table which cut diagonally through an Upper West Side apartment. At one end was the family matriarch, with a sister at one side and her husband at the other. In the middle was the eldest son (a friend of a friend, who invited me), who was leading his first Seder. The true stars, however, were the girl and boy, perhaps eleven and ten respectively, sitting next to him, who did all the things studious children should do at a Seder - not just reading but commenting, asking questions, venturing answers, etc.
I was particularly struck by an exchange between the leader and his nephew about the essence of the Seder. Rabbi Gamaliel, we read, said that if one did not discuss the meaning of the elements - pesah (a lamb shank bone), matzoh and maror (bitter herbs) - it was not a true Seder. What did the children think, asked their uncle. The boy thought that the elements weren't that important - you could substitute something else for them, or even nothing, so long as the story of Passover was told. The uncle took the contrary position, perhaps tongue in cheek: the elements were the key. It didn't matter what story people told about it, so long as people gathered around them.
Theory of religion! I'd seen descriptions about the Haggadah, and its role as a teaching script for a tradition which actively encourages discussion, multiple interpretation and even challenge, but now my ears heard it. The boy will have his Bar Mitzvah within the year, but has already held his own with his elders on questions of great moment. (Both his and his sister's Torah portions came up.) And it wasn't all child's play. The children were asked what the difference between the four kinds of children might be, and a grown up even stood up for the "rebellious" child for developmental reasons. But they also participated in a spirited debate about the meaning of freedom. And they heard the adults in deadly earnest discuss if it was still appropriate to say "Next year in Jerusalem" in the context of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.
Imagine growing up in a tradition as splendidly alive, as vigilant of past and present, and as conspicuously dependent on the contributions of each succeeding generation, as this! What a joy to witness (I got to hold up the shank bone as its symbolic significance was being discussed).
I was particularly struck by an exchange between the leader and his nephew about the essence of the Seder. Rabbi Gamaliel, we read, said that if one did not discuss the meaning of the elements - pesah (a lamb shank bone), matzoh and maror (bitter herbs) - it was not a true Seder. What did the children think, asked their uncle. The boy thought that the elements weren't that important - you could substitute something else for them, or even nothing, so long as the story of Passover was told. The uncle took the contrary position, perhaps tongue in cheek: the elements were the key. It didn't matter what story people told about it, so long as people gathered around them.
Theory of religion! I'd seen descriptions about the Haggadah, and its role as a teaching script for a tradition which actively encourages discussion, multiple interpretation and even challenge, but now my ears heard it. The boy will have his Bar Mitzvah within the year, but has already held his own with his elders on questions of great moment. (Both his and his sister's Torah portions came up.) And it wasn't all child's play. The children were asked what the difference between the four kinds of children might be, and a grown up even stood up for the "rebellious" child for developmental reasons. But they also participated in a spirited debate about the meaning of freedom. And they heard the adults in deadly earnest discuss if it was still appropriate to say "Next year in Jerusalem" in the context of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.
Imagine growing up in a tradition as splendidly alive, as vigilant of past and present, and as conspicuously dependent on the contributions of each succeeding generation, as this! What a joy to witness (I got to hold up the shank bone as its symbolic significance was being discussed).
Sunday, April 13, 2014
Scripted
I'm not going to say too much about being Jesus in our church's reading of the Passion according to Saint Matthew today, beyond that it was harder than I expected. Not that I expected it to be easy.When I first read through our script I found Jesus' lines hard to scan. He seems always to have an eye on a pre-written script which only he knows that events are following. I wasn't sure how one would say something like "You say so" without sarcasm, but happily the need to project (we had no microphones) made that impossible. It also made impossible speaking the gentle sadness that other lines, like the repeated confirmation of human frailty, seemed to express. I don't have a big voice to begin with, and here I needed to make sure people could hear every syllable, including the final syllables of phrases, which I tend to swallow.
I went through the script (as I do with the reading when I'm a lector too) many times, trying out different stresses, marking what seemed to work best. These judgments had as much to do with theology as psychology, if not more. But there's psychology, here, too, as I found.
In performance during the service this morning, I surprised myself (and everyone else) by practically bellowing the final line Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? - My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I don't think I've made a noise like that since I was a child. It wasn't entirely unpremeditated, and the narrator does introduce it "Jesus cried out with a loud voice," but its rawness took even me aback. What had happened was that Jesus, who knew - cowrote, you could say - the script, felt himself more and more trapped in it. His flesh was weak, too, and his heart grieved unto death. This wasn't just prophecies being fulfilled in unexpected ways, this was his life being extinguished.
The five of us reading the Passion were wearing black cassocks. For the final part I was standing dead center on the steps up to the altar, facing the congregation, the focal point, the still center, of all that was going on in our performance and in the space of the church. The other readers were behind me. I couldn't see them, but looked out expressionlessly as Jesus was mocked, nailed to a cross between two criminals, as gall and vinegar were offered to him, as soldiers cast lots for his clothes.
It was a reading with minimal stylized movements, not a dramatic performance. We weren't supposed to be "in character" between lines, but standing there with the black 3-ring binder in my hands I found I was - in character as the all-knowing Jesus who knew what people were going to say before they said it, the mastermind at the center of things. I didn't have to see them to know what they were going to say. I knew what would happen before it happened, because it had to happen. The Son of Man goes as it is written of him. As I'd said to Judas, Friend, do what you are here to do. Each of us playing his part in a grand spectacle, the greatest story ever foretold.
Then that became unbearable - it wasn't a spectacle, it was my life! - and I cried out.
Saturday, April 12, 2014
American religious pluralism
At an exhibition on Frank Lloyd Wright's anti-urbanist city imaginings at MoMA which features the detailed model of his Broadacre City from the mid-1930s, I discovered this rather unusual geometrical structure today. It's described in the key as: Universal worship, columbarium, cemetery, nine sectarian temples surrounding a central edifice. Is there a distinctively American theory of religion at work here?
无为 (無為) (Wuwei)
Who knew - there's a website soliciting drawings of professors. I think I know who's responsible for this rather blissed out version of yours truly. A veteran of one of my classes, she's taking the East Asian religions course I'm sitting in on this semester. That's me enjoying learning without having to teach, too...
Friday, April 11, 2014
In the pink
Here are the blossoming treetops of our courtyard from another angle - that's my office window in the background.
Wednesday, April 09, 2014
Metta for the dead
As you may know, my life was changed by a Japanese Buddhist priest friend's quip, many years ago, that religion in Japan could perhaps best be described as "ethics for the dead" (死者に対する倫理). That's the grain of sand around which my oyster brain has been polishing the pearl of my "Exploring Religious Ethics" course; the "Wider Moral Communities" project grows out of it, too.
The phrase came to mind after "Buddhism and Modern Thought" today as I reflected on our discussion of a beautiful talk Alice Walker gave at the first African-American Buddhist Retreat in 1997, "Suffering too insignificant for the majority to see" (shared with the wider world here). Walker frames her talk with the account of the murder of George Slaughter, a young African American man in the Antebellum South, by a posse led by his own (white) father, incensed, it was reported, that his horse was too fine. After an eloquent account of Buddhist responses to oppression - she references the Dalits we read about Monday, and is sure young Gautama rejected caste distinctions - and of what Buddhist practice offers oppressed peoples, she returns to the people who participated in Slaughter's murder. She returns, however, in a mode of meditation, building on and building out the familiar formulas of metta meditation.
In metta meditation you start by sending loving-kindness (metta) to yourself. The wishes are versions of this:
The circle of metta expands by steps, first to a benefactor, then to a friend, then to a neutral person, then to a difficult person, and finally to all beings.
As you know I find this psychologically as well as ethically profound. But today (after doing the guided metta meditation with Sharon Salzberg from last year) we were discussing Walker, who writes:
Let us bring our attention to the life of our young brother, our murdered ancestor, George Slaughter. We know he was a beautiful young man, and that it was this beauty and his freedom expressing it that caused his father, himself unfree, to seek his death. We can see George sitting on his stunning saddle horse. We do not know if his half-sister, white, confused by her liking for her darker brother, gave it to him. We do not know if his mother, dark and irresistible, as so many black women are, gave it to him. We do not know if he bought it himself. All we know is that he is sitting there, happy. And the horse, too, is happy.
George Slaughter, an English name. We might think of Bob Marley, half-English, with his English name; perhaps George had a similar spirit. A kindred look and attitude.
The circle widens:
Let us bring our attention to George’s mother. She who came, weeping, and picked up the shattered pieces of her child, as black mothers have done for so long.
Let us bring our attention to George’s father. He who trails the murder of his lovely boy throughout what remains of time.
Let us bring our attention to those who rode with the father, whose silence and whose violence caused so much suffering that continues in the world today.
And now let us bring our attention to George’s horse. With its big dark eyes. Who drank George’s blood in grief after the horror of his companion’s bitter death. We know by now that the other animals on the planet watch us and know us and sometimes love us. How they express that love is often mysterious.
What Walker does here is an extraordinary thing, supporting her claim that the study and practice of Buddhism ... is good medicine for healing us so that we may engage the work of healing our ancestors. Healing our ancestors? It's perhaps an appropriation of Buddhism (Walker claims not to be a Buddhist, and draws explicitly from indigenous, Womanist and other traditions), but it's one that has happened in many places before, perhaps all of them. Are not the dead, our dead, the moral community par excellence? Expanding the circle of our metta to them is, for some, no stretch at all. (The ancestors were very present also at the first retreat for Buddhists of color held at Thich Nhat Hanh's Deer Park Monastery near Escondido, CA in 2004, "Colors of Compassion.")
Metta for the dead. Of course.
Perhaps, indeed, it is widening the circle to the dead which grounds a practice in space as well as time. One of my most thoughtful students (white, a bit of a bodhisattva) saw in Walker's reflection the way towards a true and truly American Buddhism:
as far as America is concerned, Buddhism begins not in 1844 in the European scholar’s office (where surely Buddhism cannot happen at all) but rather only after the European decides it is more profitable to leave his office, to bring dukkha to the New World by ships with sugar and slaves, and to let the slaves really live it.
May I say: Amen?
The phrase came to mind after "Buddhism and Modern Thought" today as I reflected on our discussion of a beautiful talk Alice Walker gave at the first African-American Buddhist Retreat in 1997, "Suffering too insignificant for the majority to see" (shared with the wider world here). Walker frames her talk with the account of the murder of George Slaughter, a young African American man in the Antebellum South, by a posse led by his own (white) father, incensed, it was reported, that his horse was too fine. After an eloquent account of Buddhist responses to oppression - she references the Dalits we read about Monday, and is sure young Gautama rejected caste distinctions - and of what Buddhist practice offers oppressed peoples, she returns to the people who participated in Slaughter's murder. She returns, however, in a mode of meditation, building on and building out the familiar formulas of metta meditation.
In metta meditation you start by sending loving-kindness (metta) to yourself. The wishes are versions of this:
May I be happy.
May I be healthy.
May I be free from danger.
May I live with ease.
The circle of metta expands by steps, first to a benefactor, then to a friend, then to a neutral person, then to a difficult person, and finally to all beings.
May he/she/they/we be happy.
May he/she/they/we be healthy.
May he/she/they/we be free from danger.
May he/she/they/we live with ease.
As you know I find this psychologically as well as ethically profound. But today (after doing the guided metta meditation with Sharon Salzberg from last year) we were discussing Walker, who writes:
Let us bring our attention to the life of our young brother, our murdered ancestor, George Slaughter. We know he was a beautiful young man, and that it was this beauty and his freedom expressing it that caused his father, himself unfree, to seek his death. We can see George sitting on his stunning saddle horse. We do not know if his half-sister, white, confused by her liking for her darker brother, gave it to him. We do not know if his mother, dark and irresistible, as so many black women are, gave it to him. We do not know if he bought it himself. All we know is that he is sitting there, happy. And the horse, too, is happy.
George Slaughter, an English name. We might think of Bob Marley, half-English, with his English name; perhaps George had a similar spirit. A kindred look and attitude.
May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you
The circle widens:
Let us bring our attention to George’s mother. She who came, weeping, and picked up the shattered pieces of her child, as black mothers have done for so long.
May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you
Let us bring our attention to George’s father. He who trails the murder of his lovely boy throughout what remains of time.
May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you
Let us bring our attention to those who rode with the father, whose silence and whose violence caused so much suffering that continues in the world today.
May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you
And now let us bring our attention to George’s horse. With its big dark eyes. Who drank George’s blood in grief after the horror of his companion’s bitter death. We know by now that the other animals on the planet watch us and know us and sometimes love us. How they express that love is often mysterious.
May you be free
May you be happy
May you be at peace
May you be at rest
May you know we remember you
What Walker does here is an extraordinary thing, supporting her claim that the study and practice of Buddhism ... is good medicine for healing us so that we may engage the work of healing our ancestors. Healing our ancestors? It's perhaps an appropriation of Buddhism (Walker claims not to be a Buddhist, and draws explicitly from indigenous, Womanist and other traditions), but it's one that has happened in many places before, perhaps all of them. Are not the dead, our dead, the moral community par excellence? Expanding the circle of our metta to them is, for some, no stretch at all. (The ancestors were very present also at the first retreat for Buddhists of color held at Thich Nhat Hanh's Deer Park Monastery near Escondido, CA in 2004, "Colors of Compassion.")
Metta for the dead. Of course.
Perhaps, indeed, it is widening the circle to the dead which grounds a practice in space as well as time. One of my most thoughtful students (white, a bit of a bodhisattva) saw in Walker's reflection the way towards a true and truly American Buddhism:
as far as America is concerned, Buddhism begins not in 1844 in the European scholar’s office (where surely Buddhism cannot happen at all) but rather only after the European decides it is more profitable to leave his office, to bring dukkha to the New World by ships with sugar and slaves, and to let the slaves really live it.
May I say: Amen?
Tuesday, April 08, 2014
On call
Lang Religious Studies supplied the missing women to Orozco's "Table of Universal Brotherhood" at our last official event of the semester, a fabulous panel discussion of ex-students my colleague K put together under the name Calling, Career, Commitment. The alums all work in caring professions, and had enormously insightful accounts of how they found their way, how they understand their work, and how they care of in very emotional demanding work. They spoke of the importance of "lineages," support networks, humility, and how to keep enough distance between your own life and that of those you are working with to be effective - and take of your own needs, desires and relationships.I have all sorts of reservations about monolithic ways of thinking about calling. In my experience categories like "calling" often make students panic. If only they could all have been there for this discussion which showed much more multi-pronged, open-ended and clear-eyed approaches. The great discussion continued over dinner. How does one, as an idealistic young person at a liberal arts college like Lang, make one's way in the world? All three stressed that they have many interests and no intention to give all the rest up for the one they were currently pursuing. One thought many young people might resist "being defined" by a specific goal since they'd be ashamed if unable to achieve it. Another noted that many social workers don't speak of their work as a "calling" and consider those who do self-important. All three acknowledged that decisions and even dreams are heavily shadowed by economic factors - one can forget that getting a degree also usually means taking on a considerable debt. Living out a chosen calling is something not everyone has the privilege to be able to do, and there is wisdom in the experience also of those who find meaning in lives they have not chosen.
The oldest of the alumnae was particularly full of wisdom. When someone asked how she related to people who had experiences she had not had, she said that those were the times she was most effective; when the experience was too close to her own, her own unresolved feelings could get in the way.When someone asked what to do if you felt someone with your background didn't have the right to do some kind of work you managed to get hired to do, she said: think of it as a privilege, an honor. And in some connection she said that people should think of their first few jobs as teaching them what they didn't want to do.
The picture that emerged from all the discussion was enormously helpful for me. It confirmed, and deepened, my sense - vicarious, since I got into the one-profession-for-life game just in time - that the contemporary economy, and culture, demand a more experimental and pluralist, less focused and high-stakes way of navigating questions of calling and career. And during dinner it became clear to me that we should be telling students that their experience as students at a college like ours - taking courses in several areas at the same time, some familiar and some new, and choosing a new slate each semester in consultation with friends and advisers - prepares them well for precisely this. Liberal arts provides valuable "vocational training" after all!
Monday, April 07, 2014
She works hard for the money
Realized as I got off the subway at 7:03 this evening that it was exactly twelve hours to the minute after I'd got on the subway this morning. That's a long day's work for The New School! A fun day, though, starting with an energetic discussion of Ambedkar, whose take on the Buddha and his Dhamma addressed all our concerns that the standard view of "Buddhist modernism" is altogether too white and too middle class. Followed meetings with students, fielding e-mails from others, making a pitch to our Arts and Civic Engagement program about the wonders of Outside the Wire's Job performances, and a little reading of the Platform Sutra in preparation for the East Asian Religions class. This class, encountering Chan for the first time, was explosive fun, too, as instructor N let it feel its way to realizing just how radical this tradition is (or seems to be on paper...). Then two hours of Shared Capacities, our university's quixotic effort to do Gen Ed without doing Gen Ed, which started with a most encouraging meeting with the group reviewing the university for our accrediting body and concluded with the first moving draft of the animated logo we've commissioned for it... and, giddy with exhaustion, home. Still, a good day.
Sunday, April 06, 2014
Bodhisatta Ambedkar
I'm preparing for tomorrow's "Buddhism and Modern Thought" class, our one session on Ambedkar's The Buddha and his Dhamma. Ambedkar is discussed in the "engaged Buddhism" literature but rather less in the "Buddhist modernism" discourse, although he's certainly part of it. I hope students will be (as, I guess, I am) both attracted by the idea and somewhat put off by the reality of a revival of Buddhism in India in the context of Dalit liberation. Attracted because it shows the Dharma to be politically powerful. But also put off somewhat since the Buddhism Ambedkar describes is so different from the one which has emerged in the West - political and secular rather than psychological and vaguely mystical... which is precisely the point of our reading him! 
tellingly different from the individualized spirituality of the modern West into which our new Buddhisms so conveniently fit!And while we're at it, Ambedkar asserts that it strains credulity to think that Gautama went twenty-nine years without seeing sicking, old age and death. Following a Marathi play by the doyen of Indian Marxist historians, Dharmanand Kosambi's Bodhisatta, Ambedkar describes Gautama's home-leaving as the result of a political debacle. Most of his clan, the Sakyas, decide to wage war on their enemies, and are at a loss what to do with pacifists iike Gaurama; his leaving solves the problem. But the great epiphany comes when the Sakyas make peace with the Koliyas. Should Gautama return?
He had left his home because he was opposed to
war. "Now that the war is over, is there any problem left to me? Does my
problem end because war has ended?" On a deep reflection, he thought not. "The problem of war is essentially a problem
of conflict. It is only a part of a larger problem. This conflict is going on not only between kings
and nations, but between nobles and Brahmins, between householders, between
mother and son, between son and mother, between father and son, between
sister and brother, between companion and companion. The conflict between nations is occasional.
But the conflict between classes is constant and perpetual. It is this
which is the root of all sorrow and suffering in the world. True, I left home on account of war. But I cannot
go back home, although the war between the Sakyas and Koliyas has ended.
I see now that my problem has become wider. I have to find a solution for
this problem of social conflict. How far do the old-established philosophies
offer a solution of this problem?" Could he accept any one of the social
philosophies? 
He was determined to examine everything for himself. (41) (1.II.6. 4-12)
He was determined to examine everything for himself. (41) (1.II.6. 4-12)I'll have more for you after tomorrow's discussion, I'm sure. But here is something which is unlikely to come up but very interesting. It's an articulation of the theistic problem of evil very (suspiciously) close to the theodicy "trilemma" I focused on a few projects ago.
For if the moral law has originated from God, and if God is the beginning
and end of the moral order, and if man cannot escape from obeying God,
why is there so much moral disorder in the world? What is the authority of the Divine Law? What
is the hold of the Divine Law over the individual? These are pertinent
questions. But to none of them is there any satisfactory answer from those
who rely on Divine Dispensation as the basis for the moral order. (131) (3.III.6:11-12)
If there is a supreme creator who is just and merciful, why then does so much injustice prevail in the world?" asked the Blessed Lord. "He who has eyes can see the sickening sight; why does not Brahma set his creatures right? If his power is so wide that no limits can restrain [it], why is his hand so rarely spread to bless? Why are his creatures all condemned to suffering? Why does he not give happiness to all? Why do fraud, lies, and ignorance prevail? Why does falsehood triumph over truth? Why does [=do] truth and justice fail? I count your Brahma as one of the most unjust, who made a world only to shelter wrong. If there exists some Lord all-powerful to fulfil in every creature, bliss or woe, and action good or ill, then that Lord is stained with sin. Either man does not work his will, or God is not just and good, or God is blind. (133) (3.IV.2:43-44)
If there is a supreme creator who is just and merciful, why then does so much injustice prevail in the world?" asked the Blessed Lord. "He who has eyes can see the sickening sight; why does not Brahma set his creatures right? If his power is so wide that no limits can restrain [it], why is his hand so rarely spread to bless? Why are his creatures all condemned to suffering? Why does he not give happiness to all? Why do fraud, lies, and ignorance prevail? Why does falsehood triumph over truth? Why does [=do] truth and justice fail? I count your Brahma as one of the most unjust, who made a world only to shelter wrong. If there exists some Lord all-powerful to fulfil in every creature, bliss or woe, and action good or ill, then that Lord is stained with sin. Either man does not work his will, or God is not just and good, or God is blind. (133) (3.IV.2:43-44)
Page references to B. R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and his Dhamma: Critical Edition, ed. Aakash Sing Rathore and Ajay Verma (Oxford, 2011) and this online source. Image source.
Saturday, April 05, 2014
New York state of mind
I didn't, in the end, use the New York State Tax E-File system - too many chances for mistyping numbers - but it was sobering to realize I don't have answer for most of their proposed security questions either!
Friday, April 04, 2014
Revival
I love it when things converge in unexpected and unplanned ways. It's especially delicious when past projects find new partners in the present. The "Religion and Theater" course I co-taught with my colleague C in 2007 and 2010 is experiencing just such renewed attention as we speak.
One such way is pretty obvious: when I encourage people to think about how one might "stage" the Book of Job, I am building on experiences in that class. I'd been interested in theater before, but it was only in the context of a course co-taught with a director that I really saw the parallels with textual
interpretation, as well as the illuminating differences. So the course was on my mind last night in Princeton when I was extolling the ways in which my approach to Job has been affected by the interdisciplinary environment of The New School.
"Religion and Theater" has come back in another way, too. You'll recall the performances of the Book of Job for communities dealing with trauma which I've been telling people about on every available occasion (last night, too). Well, the director has recently been to Japan to help a local company do similar work for those affected by the earthquake/tsunami/radiation in Tohoku. I know a few people in Japanese theater, and am delighted to report that one of them has helped them find actors for their project. The story they wound up choosing, the Noh drama "Sumidagawa," is familiar to me, too. We taught it in "Religion and Theater"! It's a perfect story for the project, too. (And there's more: the Japanese opera director who made the connection turns out to have directed "Curlew River," Benjamin Britten's adaptation of "Sumidagawa" and my pash when we did Noh in 2010!)
And here's another thing. I raved to the "Religion and Theater" students that the community performance of the passion story on Palm Sunday was a striking point of intersection of religion and theater - in fact, they had to witness it for themselves (along with Purim). Well, guess who's in the Palm Sunday reading at my church next Sunday? And guess what part he's been given? Clue: he's been asking himself for the first time: WWJD?
One such way is pretty obvious: when I encourage people to think about how one might "stage" the Book of Job, I am building on experiences in that class. I'd been interested in theater before, but it was only in the context of a course co-taught with a director that I really saw the parallels with textual
interpretation, as well as the illuminating differences. So the course was on my mind last night in Princeton when I was extolling the ways in which my approach to Job has been affected by the interdisciplinary environment of The New School."Religion and Theater" has come back in another way, too. You'll recall the performances of the Book of Job for communities dealing with trauma which I've been telling people about on every available occasion (last night, too). Well, the director has recently been to Japan to help a local company do similar work for those affected by the earthquake/tsunami/radiation in Tohoku. I know a few people in Japanese theater, and am delighted to report that one of them has helped them find actors for their project. The story they wound up choosing, the Noh drama "Sumidagawa," is familiar to me, too. We taught it in "Religion and Theater"! It's a perfect story for the project, too. (And there's more: the Japanese opera director who made the connection turns out to have directed "Curlew River," Benjamin Britten's adaptation of "Sumidagawa" and my pash when we did Noh in 2010!)
And here's another thing. I raved to the "Religion and Theater" students that the community performance of the passion story on Palm Sunday was a striking point of intersection of religion and theater - in fact, they had to witness it for themselves (along with Purim). Well, guess who's in the Palm Sunday reading at my church next Sunday? And guess what part he's been given? Clue: he's been asking himself for the first time: WWJD?
Thursday, April 03, 2014
Staging Job
Not a huge number of people showed up for my rescheduled talk at the Princeton Public Library tonight (this picture was taken before they showed up), but it's always fun to have a chance to share ideas with people. And since I'm incapable of giving the same talk twice, it's always an opportunity to hone language, deepen an argument, or, more likely, stumble into a new insight. Tonight I worked the big insight from the talk at Monmouth College last week (whose structure and slides I used again tonight) - that imagining (or actually) staging the Book of Job changes how each speech is understood as we need to determine who's being addressed and who's hearing it: a speech needs an audience.
Fun, fun! And there's always an unexpected question at any of these presentations. Tonight's came from one of the young people manning the desk for Labyrinth Books. Had I come across anyone who regarded Job's scraping himself with a potsherd as a form of self-harm? Um... not before tonight!
Wednesday, April 02, 2014
Philosophical grammar
We've finished McMahan's Making of Buddhist Modernism, our big book of the semester. For today's class I asked students to consider how they'd write a review of it, "sketching out how you'd characterize its main argument, material and methods, and how well McMahan succeeds at what he sets out to do: bring along (at least) one passage illustrating McMahan doing what he does best and (at least) one showing limits of his research, method or analytic categories." A fruitful discussion, by and large, but it's so unusual for students to take time over a whole book here that the experience was a little disappointing for some: nine chapters and still the same argument! And since he is scrupulous in writing as a historian - it's not his business to judge what is and what is not legitimate Buddhism - it seemed to one perceptive student like nine chapters without any argument, though she recognized this as a rare and difficult achievement.
Actually McMahan does make a broad argument for the legitimacy of "Buddhist modernism" by indirection. Buddhism has always been on the make, he argues, its manifold "potential" triggered by encounter with one culture after another. But he's aware, I think, that his fine-grained account of the way modern trends selected and shifted Buddhist legacies risks playing into the hands of critics like Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Thanissaro, you'll recall, derides modern forms as so many flavors of a "Buddhist Romanticism" so embedded in western modern delusions that it has no Buddhist edge - and no saving power.
Actually McMahan does make a broad argument for the legitimacy of "Buddhist modernism" by indirection. Buddhism has always been on the make, he argues, its manifold "potential" triggered by encounter with one culture after another. But he's aware, I think, that his fine-grained account of the way modern trends selected and shifted Buddhist legacies risks playing into the hands of critics like Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Thanissaro, you'll recall, derides modern forms as so many flavors of a "Buddhist Romanticism" so embedded in western modern delusions that it has no Buddhist edge - and no saving power.
The formations of Buddhist modernism I have been
using as case studies ... have tended to draw Buddhism into the orbit of
western thought, rather than vice versa. Their particular kind of hybridity is
often like that of Henry Steel Olcott, which, in Stephen Prothero's
interpretation, was a 'creolization' that assimilated Buddhism to largely
Protestant categories, assumptions, and logic. Like a creole dialect, its
lexicon was Buddhist, while its grammar was largely Protestant ... I have also
hinted that other, often Asian, Buddhist modernisms, like other modernities,
may reverse this situation, assimilating the lexicon of modernity to the
grammar of Buddhism. (241-42)
I really like the idea of a modern lexicon creolized by a "grammar of Buddhism" (or grammars, surely). It's what I have long tried to do with my mantra that "religious studies is the discipline that reminds us there is no consensus on the real." In the coming weeks I'll be pushing students to consider that there are Buddhist alternatives to our easy ways of understanding agency, causality, virtue, meaning.
Tuesday, April 01, 2014
Mountaintop experience
If you're around, come next week to see David Zurick's amazing photos of the Himalaya, and hear his remarkable insights into the region. David was part of our Kailash party last summer, and there's nowhere he hasn't been, nothing he hasn't thought about! (I'm a respondent.)
Monday, March 31, 2014
Guided meditation
I met a friend of spirit
He drank and womanized
And I sat before his sanity
I was holding back from crying
He saw my complications
And he mirrored me back simplified
And we laughed how our perfection
Would always be denied
"Heart and humor and humility"
He said "Will lighten up your heavy load"
I left him for the refuge of the roads... (source)
This made sense for the class, as one of the assignments over the Spring Break had been to watch that hagiopic about Trungpa. It also fit because here our weight shifts from considering in what ways "western modernity" has reshaped or distorted "Buddhism" to exploring how "Buddhism" might challenge or complicate "western modernity."
Our reading was the chapter on meditation in McMahan. It's pretty tame stuff compared to the intoxication, play and wrathful practice of Trungpa. But the juxtaposition helped me push the importance of teachers in Buddhist practice. One of the myths the "scientific Buddha" has left us is that meditation is an objective, self-correcting technology for approaching reality. Anyone can do it, and, doing it, will discover the truth. Do try this at home.
Trungpa's tantric tradition raises one kind of question about this: some of the fruits of Buddhist practice are very powerful, and can destroy as well as enlighten. You need a teacher to direct and correct your experiments with truth. From the perspective of the religious studies critics of Buddhist modernism a different question poses itself. As Robert Sharf pointed out in a famous exposé of the Vipassanā movement, there is no consensus among Buddhist traditions as to what the stages and fruits of different kinds of meditation are. People achieve what their traditions lead them to expect to achieve. The history of Zen-Catholic dialogue should make that clear - and also that this might not, for practitioners, be the end of the world.
We didn't talk about Sharf but about Descartes, author of his own set of Meditations, whom McMahan brings in in a fascinating way. His method of radical doubt would be congenial to a Buddhist, McMahan avers, if only he didn't recoil from the impermanence he discerns in desperate hope of something permanent - a self, which turns out to need supernatural backup as it tries to live. You don't need to be a Buddhist to see the flaw in the argument. Kant saw it! Ambrose Beirce's had a pithier way of making the leap of faith in the cogito clear: I think I think, therefore I think I am. The existence of doubting establishes only that doubting is, not that a doubter is. To McMahan, Buddhist meditation is thorough and thoroughgoing in a way Descartes' isn't:
Interesting discussions await, now on my best effort at Buddhist terms. Not that I'll be able to mirror back the complications simplified!
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Long time
At church today there was a young man I thought I recognized - but where from? He was only to happy to tell me during the coffee hour, as he had come there expressly in hopes of seeing me. Turns out he was in the second iteration of my "Problem of Evil" course at Princeton 15 years ago - the one with a film series in vast Dodds Auditorium (he said he still remembers "The Third Man"). He's been reading my Job book with some friends at his church, and found out online that I frequent Holy Apostles. Most people would have found my college web page and sent an e-mail, but this was charmingly different.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Moving pictures
Up to Ossining for a celebratory dinner with the Queer Christianities crew. The bleak weather - a far cry from the autumnal splendor of our last outing - only made the warm cheer that much more festive by contrast. And we went to see a perfectly silly movie, Wes Anderson's delirous "The Grand Budapest Hotel" before dinner - and watched a creepy old masterpiece over some New Mexico bubbly I'd brought afterward, 1945's "The Picture of Dorian Gray."
Friday, March 28, 2014
Peacekeeper?
Is this how a Tibetan lama looks like? Maybe so. I've asked the "Buddhism and Modern Thought" class to watch the hagiographic documentary "Crazy Wisdom: A Film about the Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche." The most important founder of Tibetan Buddhist institutions in the West, Chögyam Trungpa is - to put it mildly - a fascinating character. It'll be interesting to hear what students make of his unconcealed "drinking and womanizing" (as Joni Mitchell described it in her song about meeting him), but I suspect our discussion will gravitate to the ways he recreated the outward forms of British colonialism in Boulder. He gave his hippie followers elocution lessons in the queen's English, setting up an aristocratic "Court" complete with valets and maids, and the khaki-clad Dorje Kasung military guard.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
White city
The Chicago Architec- ture Foundation has a "LEGO architecture studio" - long tables with red cloth work surfaces along them and boxes of clean new white LEGO Architecture pieces. What fun! Most people build skyscrapers, many spectacular. Having limited time I just sought out unusual pieces and tried to find unexpected ways of putting them together.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Western Illinois scenes
Start and end of the second enjoyable day of what
friend H is calling Monmouth Jobapalooza!
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