Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

Marriage equality, the NYC Prop 8 Demo and channeling anger

Tonight the NYC queer community expressed its anger at the passage of Prop 8 in California with an old-fashioned street demonstration outside of the LDS church on Broadway and 65th Street. It was encouraging to see thousands of us to fight for marriage equality, even though it was for another state. How many of those that were out tonight have been part of the marriage equality fight in New York state? Certainly quite a few, since I recognized quite a number from the annual lobbying day in Albany. But many are not connected to any organized efforts. And there were some who chanted slogans that were anti-church.

Now, I am not exactly pro-church. I continue to be amazed that the one thing that brought together all the feuding religions to sit down in Jerusalem was their desire to issue a statement condeming queer people. It's enough to make a queer Jewish Buddhist into a militant atheist. Except that's actualy accepting their definition of queer folk — outside the spiritual. And quite frankly, I refuse to deny my connection to the Divine.

 Ours is a community that has been spiritually wounded by the religious establishment. And often, at demonstrations like these, where the religious establishment has truly done something heinous, the pain of this wounding comes out in expressions of hatred for religion and denial of our deepest longings for experiencing the Divine. The reason I seek loving relationships with men is that is where I experience the Divine Presence. I experience divinity and mystery in all my relations (to steal a phrase from Body Electric) whether they are physical or not, with men and women. But that highest connection has been in loving relationship with another man.

This evening I heard a lot of anger. And anger is appropriate. But I don't want my queer community to throw out the baby with the bath water by jettisoning spiritual connection while fighting organized bigotry and ignorance masquerading as religion.

Over at fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver has been debunking the analysis that it was the black  community that was responsible for the Prop 8 loss. His analysis of the voting patterns showed that it was a demographic I fall in, that is voters over 45, that made the difference.

But the point i really want to make here is the lesson that needs to be learned from the Obama campaign. The queer community in California created advertising that talked to people who were already on their side. Or just to themselves. They did not get shoe leather on the ground organizing in communities around the state. They did not work hard to engage people in the middle who could be swayed one way or the other. Sure, the LDS poured lots of money into the state. But churches are also communities that are highly organized. Where is our community organization? Our leaders are not deep in the community — and they sure dont' do much cross community organizing.

The very fact that we are even having this issue be fought so closely is something I never expected to see in my lifetime. I expected when I came out and joined the gay movement in 1970 that I would see a world where we felt safe, and were not objects of ridicule, disrespect or violence. That how we expressed our love would not be a violation of the law. I wasn't expecting to see legal recognition on the order of marriage. In fact, in 1970 there were many in the movement who wanted nothing to do with the institution they saw as obsolete.

I deeply believe marriage is important and makes communities stronger. And so I want it for my queer community. I believe deeply in the American value of freedom of religion. That means there will be religions out there that will never recognize my relationships as either valid or expressions of Divine love through human action. That's okay with me. I don't have to join that religion. And they don't have to marry me to anyone.

The mixture of marriage rites and marriage rights are some of the confusion that makes this a problem in the pubiic arena. But we are not engaging the people of faith who would be on our side. I am thrilled that the Empire State Pride Agenda has a program called Pride in the Pulpit, which engages communities of faith and leaders of those communities so that they actually are a large part of the efforts in Albany to extend marriage rights. I would have liked to have seen those people at the demonstration tonight. I chose to wear a star of David and a kippah at the demonstration be be out as a person of faith, because I felt it was important not only to be queer identified, but identified with Divine love. Which transcends religion.

May we open up to the pain of our spiritual wounding and use it to reconnect. May we use this reconnection to reach out to those who would hear us and support us if we learned to listen to them and truly hear their concerns. And I know we will prevail in our cause, because ultimately, nothing can withstand the power of love. 

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One of the nice things about the demonstration was I got to hang out with friends. I ran into people from GLYNY Again, the alumni organization of Gay & Lesbian Youth of New York (in photo below). I ran into friends from synagogue. From the Center. From my old schools. Work. It was quite a lot of fun in that way.

And as I left I saw the line of police cars that we so often see even when there are no demonstrations. As though they were there to intimidate the population. When Ann Northrup was instructing the marshalls on how to make sure there was no violence at the march, all I could think was, there are provocateurs in this crowd. There are secret police taking photos. And the line of police cars did not make me feel safer, they reminded me that the Bush years have been a growing police state, that used the terrorist attack of 2001 as an excuse to further strip us of our freedoms. I can only pray that the new president can reverse this trend, even though so much of this erosion is local.

Use the Force, Moses...

Is G!d a person — a being with a personality — or an impersonal force? Looking at Jewish scripture, where G!d is given quite a personality, one would assume Jews would answer that indeed G!d is a being with whom one can have a relationship. Not so according to a Pew Forum poll from June of this year. As you can see from the graph above, 50% of Jews defined the Divine as an impersonal force. The total however only adds up to 75%, leaving me wonder what the other Jews answered. Or what the other choices were.

The interesting thing to note is that just below the Jews are the Buddhists, 40% of those who answered said impersonal force. Less than the Jews. And 20% said a personality -- also less than the Jews, and on this answer, that was to be expected. That any Buddhists gave the "person" answer at all really disqualifies them as classic Buddhists. In fact, even the impersonal force answer isn't quite right, because it presupposes a being of some sort, which classical Buddhism does not accept. But in terms of available answers one can see from this graph, it comes closest.

Where do you fall on this graph? And what other answers do you think the poll ought to have reflected?

A Sweet Jewish Buddhist New Year

Rabbi Alan Lew tells the story of how his friend, Norman Fischer came to visit him while Lew was studying at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Fischer had taken the Buddhist path and became the co-abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. But that day he visited Lew, they went into the Seminary's synagogue and joined in prayer at the morning minyan. Lew was amazed to see the fervor with which Fischer davenned. He asked about it and Fischer replied:

"You know, Alan, now that I've done Zen meditation for twenty years, I could do this — I could practice ordinary Judaism — Torah, Shabbat, and Tefillah — and it would be enough. I wouldn't have to do anything else. But if I hadn't meditated for all those years, I wouldn't even know what this was — I wouldn't know how deep it was. I wouldn't know how utterly gratifying it is."

For those of you, who like me, are on this dual path of non-duality, I wish you the sweetest Jewish Buddhist New Year.

Zoketsu Norman Fischer. Photo by Laura Trippi. Creative commons usage.

The Sexy Men of Venezuela: Are You My Angel?

If you aren't familiar with the annual Mr. Venezuela contest then you are truly missing one of the world's great expositions of male beauty. Here, for your pleasure, and for my hungry ghost, is Angel Casallas from last year's competition.

And as an angel, he brings to mind this beautifully wistful paean to male beauty, Allen Ginsberg's poem, A Supermarket in California:

   

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --- and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier. Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe.

Buddhism as a Brand, Part 3: Zen and the Art of Energy Drinks

I'm a copywriter, so I like it when I find a product with a clever name. One of the first jobs I got as a writer was the naming of a new panty/girdle from Playtex that, like the "cross your heart" bra, lifted and separated the buns instead of the breasts. They wanted something playful but not too risque. I thought, copywriting is sure gonna be fun. And it is much of the time. So you have some background to my reaction when I came upon this product being sold in my local grocery:

I was amused, delighted at the clever word play and once again horrified to see a the name of a spiritual path, Zen, once again used to sell stuff: Zenergize energy drink tablets. Of course, this is better than the fraud that is kabbalah water, which is just water that costs a lot more. Here you actually have a vitamin drink with some nutritional value, and you can pretend you're still a kid and drinking Fizzies! Except of course, the energy that one can discover from sitting zazen is beyond anything a fizzy drink can deliver. This stuff isn't cheap either. But I will say this, it is greener than buying not so Smart Water or Vitamin Water which just adds more plastic bottles to the world's trash heaps and polluted oceans. But does Zenergize have anything to do with Zen Buddhism other than a clever marketing name? Not a drop.

At least Original Zen, a powdered drink mix sold as a healthy substitute for coffee was formulated by someone who studied Chinese herbal medicine. FIlled with lots of traditional herbs that have been studied in academic settings to determine what their health effects really are, the site for Original Zen takes a serious approach and links to studies showing the anti-cancer properties of Astralagus for example. Still, I don't think this is what was Originally Zen.

I realize that since no one is selling wood from the true cross anymore, and since holy water doesn't from Lourdes doesn't have the cachet of eastern religion (after all, Lourdes is just superstition, right) marketers are looking for whatever seems both cool and real. Zen fits the bill.

However, to mangle a phrase from Lao-tzu,  the Zen that can be sold is not the true Zen.

Jubu News

Well, other bloggers have picked on the S.J.Parker story — the story appears in a thread on Jubus in a Thai website that also notes the posting by Shravasti Dhammika that I responded to last week. The blog Going For Refuge also picks up the Parker story, and comments on it from a more personal POV. The Precious Metal blog, that covers stories of interest to Buddhists, including good coverage of Burma and Tibet, re-publishes the story whole, without comment, though its readers have a lot to say on the subject that's amusing. Tibetblogs.com picks up the Precous Metal posting whole, with the comments from the blog. Whereas over at Heck of A Guy, the focus on the Parker story shifts to Leonard Cohen, who the author is a real fan of.

In queer jubu news, a lesbian couple in Michigan was searching for a rabbi to marry them (sounds like the opening of a joke, I know). And because one of the partners came from a mixed marriage (not meaning a man and a woman but a Jew and a Gentile) the rabbi wouldn't perform the ceremony. This is actually the case at my synagogue, where there have been queer commitment ceremonies for years, but only for couples where both partners were Jewish. The reason? You are making an agreement, a covenant or b'rit, and this kind of sacred covenant requires that you be Jewish. Anything else is simply a contract. Secular.

As it turns out, they found a Jubu cantor (who is also an acupunturist) to do the ceremony. Mazel Tov! If only the Jubu cantor was a gay guy! I'd be on my way to Michigan to ask for a date.

Jubu Review: A response to the Venerable Shravasti Dhammika

A few months back, Shravasti Dhammika, a Buddhist monk of 32 years practice and the spiritual advisor to the Buddha Dhamma Mandala Society in Singapore, added a post to his blog on the subject of hyphenated Buddhists in general, and Jewish-Buddhists in particular.  The good monk wrote that whole idea of hyphenated Buddhists gives him an “identity crisis,” which is a pretty funny thing for him to say, given that an identity is about as insubstantial as it gets in Buddhism. I suspect he was winking when he wrote this, since his sense of humor is on display throughout this posting. After all, mistaking the skandhas for a self would be a shande. 

Nevertheless, the question of hyphenated Buddhists, and Jewish Buddhism or Buddhist Judaism in particular disturbed him. And it’s a question that that often comes up in my world, since I identify myself as a  Jewish Buddhist. I am hardly alone on this path, since it’s been estimated that 30% of American born Buddhists also identify in some way as Jewish. That’s enough people to become a market! And so,, no surprise, there are quite a number of books, films and t-shirts (blending spiritual path, identity and fashion with Western consumerism) on the phenomenon. The venerable Dhammika refers to some books by an IMC teacher I admire, Sylvia Boorstein, in particular. I don’t think she would define herself as a Jubu — her excellent essay in Beside Still Waters, an anthology of writings by Jews and Christians who have been profoundly changed by their Buddhist practice is her response to the question of hyphenated identity and I recommend it. This is my response to the venerable Dhammika’s post where he writes:

“Is it possible to be a practicing Jew and a practicing Buddhist at the same time? No it is not! The two are mutually incompatible. A Buddhist would have to see most of the practices of Orthodox and even Reformed Judaism as harmless but empty rituals that contributed nothing to the development of virtue or the freeing of the mind. If anything, they reinforce a specific identity; the very thing Buddhism seeks to transcend. The Torah’s unambiguous demand for total allegiance to the God of Israel and the Buddha’s God-free spirituality and world view, separate the two religions from the word go.”

I take issue with a number of things he writes here. Just as I take issue with Rabbi Akiva Tatz, who wrote a book called Letters to a Buddhist Jew, that I will write about in another post. However, what both gentlemen have in common is a lack or experience or deep knowledge of each other’s path, so that neither man has enough of an understanding of the other’s path to make a full judgment or fair assessment.

Today though, I’m sticking to the venerable Dhammika’s comments. So let’s start with his contention that the Torah demands “total allegiance to the God of Israel.”

I’m not sure what his concept of that God is, but I have to respond with the words of Rabbi Irwin Kula: “I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in either.”

The word God itself is problematic. People tend to think of a character, a personage, a being with a personality, and for that matter, a gender. Thinking about god this way is basically a violation of one of the commandments — against idolatry, which isn’t restricted to making physical images. In Judaism one cannot speak the name of the Divine because to name something is to limit it, to have control over it, and the Divine is beyond language or limit.

One of the central Jewish prayers, said several times during services, is the Kaddish. The point of the Kaddish is to break through the tendency of the mind to reify God. Rather than being an empty ritual, it is a prayer designed to break through any definition of what is essentially beyond the limited power of language to express and thus help open the one praying to an experience of the unconditioned state. If one recites it rote, without consciousness, it is no different from simply reciting the sutras without mindfulness. Or for that matter reciting a sutra as a mantra in the hopes of getting a new car (Can you say Sokka Gakkai?).

The Kaddish is a deep teaching about the nature of the Divine, which in the Jewish mystical tradition is sometimes referred to as the Ayn Sof: infinite no-thing-ness. It is beyond form and formlessness. This is not the same thing as Nirvana (or is it?), though I can’t rightly say, never having experienced it. For that matter, it is an experience, from all I can gather, than can only be expressed by what it is not (which is expressed beautifully in the medieval work of Christian mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing). This is the place where language breaks down. So while I can’t say with any authority that these concepts are equivalent, I have a sense that they arise from the same place (or no-place as the case may be).

I remember when I had walked away from Judaism entirely, and had given myself over to meditation practice and the study of the sutras and the various commentaries. My friend Marion asked me what I had found in Buddhism that I hadn’t found in Judaism. I read her some passages and spoke to her about what meditation had given me. She opened up a siddur — the book of Jewish prayer — and pointed to some passages that went to the heart of what I was talking about. In fact, several of these prayers were mindfulness practices — they weren’t something so much to be read as instructions to a practice of awareness. I was dumbfounded, since I had never recognized this before. Like the venerable Dhammika, I saw the liturgy as empty ritual. But of course, no rabbi in my youth had ever taught these prayers as an awareness and mindfulness practice. I wasn’t even sure there were rabbis who understood these prayers in that way.

Of course, that was my ignorance of my own tradition. And the fact that no rabbis in my youth taught in this was was a result of the history of post-enlightenment Judaism in the U.S. and the broken lineage of deep teachers in the last century — . I knew nothing of masters like Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, who taught a meditation technique that reads like a text on Vipassana, and who was murdered in the Holocaust.

When I delved deeper into the tradition of my ancestors I discovered many texts I would never have understood but for my experience with Buddhist meditation. And I met rabbis who not only understood the practices these prayers called for, they actively taught them.

As for a hairy thunderer in the sky demanding total allegiance — well, that’s just a story. A teaching story. I don’t imagine that the venerable Dhammika literally believes all of the Jataka tales. And I doubt he believes in a literal being called Mara. These tales are told to point to a deeper truth.

I can’t deny that Judaism, like Shinto, carries the mythic history and consciousness of a particular people from a particular time. The Torah, like the Kojiki, are the stories that encode the deepest teaching of the tradition. Taking it literally is about as delusionary as believing that the Japanese emperor is a direct descendent of the sun goddess, Amaterasu. Ahem, well. Obviously many Japanese did believe this well into the last century — the Venerable Dhammika neglected to ask the same question about hyphenated Buddhists to the entire Japanese nation, whose population pretty much considers itself both Buddhist and Shinto. But as always, I digress…

The problems arise when people take the stories literally — it’s what leads to kamikaze pilots, the suicide bombers of WWII, not to mention murderous zealots like Baruch Goldstein. Or lunatics like Fred Phelps. I stray again…

Getting back to the empty prayers and rituals…perhaps the most important prayer in Judaism is the Shema – which, rather than being a demand for total allegiance is a radical statement that calls one’s full attention to the unity of reality.

While my interpretation of the prayer may sound unorthodox to many who grew up with the English translation that appears across from the Hebrew in the siddur, it is actually within the realm of orthodoxy (which is not usually where I find myself):

Listen/Be mindful, you who wrestle with the Inexpressible, the Inexpressible is Greater/Beyond Anything you can imagine, and it is Indivisible from Reality - there is nothing that is separate or not a part of It (including you and your struggle).

The Hebrew is a lot shorter, but it’s a language of great economy that manages to express a non-dual experience of the Divine that is both transcendent and immanent simultaneously.

Now certainly there are places where Judaism and Buddhism clearly part ways. There is no monastic tradition (that has survived, i.e. the Essenes) in Judaism. While Buddhism sees the way out of suffering through equanimity, Judaism calls for passionate engagement with all of life — experiencing joy and suffering as the fullness that is human existence. While Buddhist monks don’t marry, don’t work and don’t own anything, historically rabbis have been expected to marry, work and provide for their families. This is where the paths diverge for those who wish to practice, not simply as laymen (ah, the innate sexism and limits of language), but as complete devotees.

By our very nature as humans, we cannot see or express the whole truth. Each of our traditions displays merely one facet of the jewel of Reality. Each does it’s best to give its adherents a practice that will enable them to see this and apprehend an experience beyond the limits of expression.  And each has practices that can be bizarre and counterproductive to the goal — how could it be otherwise, given their long history and the addition of any number of adopted teachings and offshoot branches.

The rabbi of  Congregation Har HaShem in Boulder, in his blog notes an beautifully strange similarlity between the writings of the Soto Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki and the 18th century Chassidic rabbi, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev. This great master wrote that:

“we are holy in that we can become aware of our essential nothingness – 'Know that you come from nothing' – and that Jewish practice (mitzvoth) raise our consciousness of the nothingness underlying our existence, and the transitory nature of our materiality.”

At this point you would be excused if you quoted Shakespeare and said of me, “I think the lady doth protest too much.”

Yes there are differences, and there are practices in each tradition that would be anathema to the other. I do my best to live fully in the real contradictions while celebrating the ultimate oneness. Duality is real. I live in it every day. There’s just a greater reality. And the teachings of both traditions create a feedback loop that helps take me deeper to a place that transcends both.

Rabbi Arthur Green, in Tormented Master, his biography of the Chassidic master, Rabbi Nachman, related this conversation between the rabbi and a close disciple. R. Nachman explained that he really no longer needed to follow many of the commandments. Because in following the path of mitzvoth, of living in blessing, he had “reached the other shore” and no longer needed the vehicle of the form. But he continued to follow these practices because he had followers — and if he kept up the practice his followers would be inspired to continue, despite the difficulties of the path, and could someday reach the far shore themselves. Sounds like a boddhisatva vow to me.

I’m grateful to the venerable Dhammika — his words gave me an opening to write about all this in more depth than usual and possibly open a dialog.  And I am grateful to my teachers in both traditions: their words and their living examples have been a blessing in my life.

One more parenthetical — a postscript: here is a question/koan to consider on the dual path from this Jewish Buddhist — to go with the collection of Jewish Buddhist haiku that gets sent around by email endlessly (and believe me I’ve seen it many times, so please stop sending it to me!):
Mu. Nu?

Sex and the Sutras: Sarah Jessica Parker, Public Relations, Jews and Buddhism

A very odd item was posted on the pr-inside.com website about Sarah Jessica Parker’s interest in Buddhism. Titled “Sarah Jessica Parker: Hollywood's Newest Jew-Bu?” It starts with a lead-in that is disingenuous to say the least:

“Vanishing from public view to her discreet Irish hideaway, superstar Parker seems to be seeking tranquility down a path that many of her faith have trodden in the past.”

Uhhh, you haven’t vanished from public view if a public relations firm is writing about your inner spiritual explorations. The real question is who or what the PR firm is flacking. As PR goes, this isn’t a very good story for SJP. It suggests that the reason for her interest in Buddhism is that her marriage is “incontinent.”

Before I even go on considering the reason for the story, I have to stop and ask what Jeff Culhane, the writer of the story, meant by using that word. Incontinent usually refers to the inability to control one’s excretory functions. Unless SJP or Matthew have had surgery recently, I don’t think that’s the issue.

Incontinence can also refer to an unrestrained expression of emotion — such as incontinent rage. Not being inside that relationship there’s no way of knowing, and I won’t speculate. Last, the word can mean a lack of sexual restraint, which, once again, there is no way of knowing. Except to say that given the public persona of both SJP and Matthew (who I had a crush on the moment I saw him in Torch Song Trilogy off Broadway years ago) none of these definitions seems to suit the situation. But what do I know?

Perhaps the whole story is a joke, since one “close confidante” quoted in the interview said: “ 'Sarah travels a lot, mostly by air. And in the Jewish mystical tradition -- where Judaism comes closest to Buddhism -- God exists on many planes.” Ba-da-bump.

Another quote in the article ends with an extremely random sentence, making me wonder whether an editor looked at this piece at all:

'Buddhism fills a void left by her traditional Jewish faith,' confides a close friend of Parker's. 'It's a way for her to understand and diminish personal suffering, let go of fears, and to get pieces of mind. She still appreciates the strong community and traditions of Judaism, but wants to discover the wisdom of another religion without abandoning her born faith. She enjoys getting mail.'

Mail? You lost me. So back to the question of why this story in the first place? SJP doesn’t need any publicity right now. Who else is mentioned in the story? Ajahn Brahm, author of 'Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties' is mentioned by name along with tbe book, but it hardly seems like a way to sell this volume. Other books mentioned are the usual Jubu suspects: "The Jew in the Lotus," "One God Clapping," and, of course, "Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist!"
Well, if all this reading is truly on her list it’s at least getting information from respected sources. I can only wish SJP discovers wisdom and peace in her search for the end of suffering. She isn't chasing the delusionary teachers whose spread their insanity — unlike Madonna, who decided she’s actually 36 years old because her Kabbalah teacher explained the mathematics of her recent 50th birthday mystically. Right.

Plasticized Bodies, Advertising and the Illegal Trade in Organs

JWT in Shanghai is running some ads to convince the Chinese to donate organs, with a campaign for the Red Cross that shows organs with bodies inside

Am I on drugs or is there something really bizarre and disturbing about an organ donation campaign running in a country where prisoners have their organs removed (sometimes before execution) for sale?

The ad above, one of several, is supposed to be lungs though it looks like kidneys to me (does it remind you of the humans in pods in The Matrix?).  Others show livers and hearts. And it is true that is a shortage of organs for transplant. Only 50 to 60 kidneys are replaced a year in Hong Kong while the waiting list for transplants numbers around 500. But according to Human Rights Watch/Asia, about 2 to 3 thousand organs a year are cut from the bodies of executed Chinese prisoners. This is state sponsored theft (and desecration). I guess the ad campaign is encouraging private citizens to get a piece of the action, since transplant services are readily available to high ranking Party officials and cash-paying foreigners. Of course, there are those unfortunates who have their organs stolen. I seem to recall reading a science fiction novel about this in the 60s. Anyone recall what that might have been?

Here in New York City we have not avoided this controversy. Last year, 20/20 reported that the plasticized bodies in the extremely popular Bodies exhibit at the South Street Seaport were executed Chinese prisoners. The German doctor who invented the process that used to put these human bodies being put on display around the world, says he has stopped using bodies from China because some of them shows signs of torture. The exhibit in NYC now offers refunds after a lawsuit by the state attorney general.

I don’t know how much Chinese citizens know about the Bodies exhibit, but it certainly isn’t news on the street in Shanghai that there’s an illegal traffic in stolen organs. So what they must think when they see these ads? And what was the team at JWT thinking?

Oh yes, the images are striking, and you have to look at them. True. And that’s the first job of advertising — to get you to stop and pay attention. But this doesn’t go on to persuade me of anything other than being certain not to accept drinks from strangers in a Shanghai bar.

That's the advertising exec speaking. Now let's hear from the Jewish Buddhist. One of the many meditations taught by the Buddha was the charnel ground meditation — one was supposed to sit amidst the burned and decomposing bodies to meditate on the impermanence of one's own body. In the Buddha's time, there were places where the remains were left to decompose or be eaten by wild animals. Because there are no charnel grounds in New York City — or much anywhere anymore — Buddhist monks have been going to the Bodies exhibit to take on this meditation. Certainly seeing these bodies is a powerful experience of the fragility and impermanence of our physical nature.

However the Jew in me recoils at this practice — and at the exhibit. Just as a living person is the image of the Divine, so to the remains, which should have its integrity, at least until it naturally decomposes. This very reaction is interesting though. The Buddhist in me says this is about attachment to the body. So I'm going to have to sit with this. Perhaps I will use the JWT ads as a meditation mandala on this subject.

Buddhism as a Brand

The New York Times today reported  that Buddhism may be
dying out in Japan. I am not in a position to be able to determine the accuracy of that report, however I did want to comment on something Kazuma Hayashi, a Buddhist priest, said about the custom of selling posthumous honorific names to families of the recently deceased:

“I know that, originally, that’s not what Buddhism was about,” Mr. Hayashi said of the top name. “But it’s a brand that our customers choose. Some really want it, so that means there’s a strong desire there, and we have to respond to it.”

There is so much wrong with that statement I don't know where to begin. There is the reference to people who come for his services as customers. This may be a problem of translation though. The Japanese okyaku can be translated as either "guest" or "customer," however I suspect customer is indeed what Mr. Hayashi meant.

Then he said that he sells these names because people really want it, there's a strong desire. Uhhh, pardon me, but isn't Buddhism about letting go of desire? Certainly any Zen priest could tell you that. Of course, Buddhism is so debased in Japan there are sects that teach believers that chanting can bring them material wealth. Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?

The Buddha did not chant to change the path of the deceased. But of course, just as Christianity picked up local customs and gods and incorporated them into local expressions of the faith, Buddhism radically changed as it moved from northern India through China to Japan. The Japanese in fact see no contradiction be being both Shinto and Buddhist, but then Shinto is a religion and Buddhism, at least as taught by the Buddha, was a way of life, a practice. Not a religion. All the rites and rituals came later. This doesn't really matter though today since it has become a religion for so many. Complete with deities the Buddha wouldn't recognize. But this is a bigger subject.   

Then there is the issue of Buddhism as a brand. This is one of my personal bugaboos. Buddhism is not a brand. The Democratic party is not a brand. A candidate is not a brand. This is the infection of consumerism into religion and politics. And I am afraid my industry, advertising, is probably very guilty in bringing this way of thinking to the world. Still, every time I hear a pundit on CNN  refer to something like "the Kennedy brand" my blood boils (clearly I am not meditating enough).

The posthumous sale of indulgences is what led to schism in the Roman church in the middle ages. It drove people from the church. And clearly it is having a similar effect in Japan in Buddhsim.

Buddhist priests in Japan own the family temple and hand down the job to their sons, since they marry. Another unique wrinkle in Japanese Buddhism. I have nothing against priests marrying. I think the Catholic church would be a happier place if priests were allowed to marry again (as they did, even popes were married, until the early middle ages). But this is simply Buddhism as the family business.

We all seek comfort when someone we love dies. Even more so when a child dies. In Japan, the custom is to purchase a statue of the bodhisatva Jizo, who is said to intercede on behalf of the souls of dead children (and aborted fetuses) in hell. As you can see from this photo from Kamakura's famous Hase Temple, business is booming.

No wonder that Japan people are turning away even as more Americans look to Buddhism as a refuge from consumerist culture and materialism.