The Great Gong Sounds! The World Rejoices in the Selection of a new Zen Pope, Bodhidharma XVI

The Great Gong sounded inside Zenican Compound near Beijing today, heralding the election of the new Zen Pope who chose for himself the name Bodhidharma XVI.

Shortly thereafter, Bodhidharma appeared before the crowd wearing the traditional ragged robe and flipflops and was greeted by cheers and shouts of "Svaha!" Zen Pope Bodhidharma, formerly American Roshi Jerry Smith, is the first New World zen pope, following a Pole, and before that, a dozen centuries of Chinese, Mongolian, Korean and Japanese zen popes. The predecessor to Bodhidharma XVI, Hung-Jen Hui-Neng II, is considered by most to have been extraordinarily great and to have retired to Parinirvana.

As all of you who have paid any attention to history know, the zen popes have been important figures on the world scene for the last century. Calming heightened tensions between the Chinese and Japanese governments sixty years ago, Zen Pope Cats Meow VI was able to forestall the entry of Japan into a world conflict on the side of the Nazis. The dust-up that ensued, known as "The Quiet War," where Allied Forces routed the Nazis without firing a shot, was over in a week.

Several years later, Zen Pope Misty Cloud III was instrumental in calming tensions when the Maoists took over China. The Dalai Lama has given the then-pope a great deal of credit for preventing a takeover of Tibet that was thought possible in the late 1950s. Many historians today laugh at the idea of a Chinese invasion of  the fabled wonderland of Tibet.

The Dalai Lama left his residence in Llasa last week to participate in the funeral for Zen Pope Hui-Jen Hui-Neng II. The leader of Tibet has stayed in the peaceful city of Beijing this past week, discussing events with gatherings of Buddhists and worldwide political leaders. Meantime, great roshis gathered in seclusion in Zenican Compound composing gothas in competition for the eventual selection/election of the new Zen Pope.

The early betting favorite, according to bookmakers in Britain, was Roshi Zhivago of Russia. Word, leaked from the Zenican, was that his gotha, titled "Straighten Up and Fly Right" was judged "a little too dusty" for the sensibilities of the assemblege, ending his chances for selection. Roshi Jerry Smith's gotha, "No Soap," was considered a clever use of laundry day to make a profound point about purity and frugal use of electricity. His selection by acclimation resulted shortly after the gotha was read.

President Al Gore flew back to America after a short meeting with the new Zen Pontiff. Gore is known to have been very grateful to Zen Pope Hui-Jen Hui-Neng II who in 2000 convinced Republican Presidential candidate George Bush to not resist a full recount of Florida votes, and to allow a "do-over" in Briard county where confusing so-called butterfly ballots had been used. The re-vote and recount resulted in a victory for Gore in the state and shortly thereafter in the Electoral College, making him the 43rd president of the United States. Zen Pope Hui-Jen Hui-Neng was later with the President when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his actions which peacefully brought democracy to the nation of Iraq. The American people were so grateful for The Great and Endless Peace, as it's been called, a Constitutional Amendment received bountiful public support that allows Gore, specifically, an unlimited number of terms as the country's president.

I am a Buddhist who has no wish to see suffering eradicated

I am an existential Buddhist who does not wish to see suffering eradicated in the world.

This is so because I cannot see how existence without challenges [or with only make-work challenges] would be satisfying.

And if I (just, just!) perfect myself and eradicate my own suffering, I get booted to parinirvana [that is, unless I aggressively fight off the promotion], which doesn’t sound like much fun.

I cannot see how the loneliness of parinirvana is appealing. A universe of just me, the Adibuddha, and — what? — a stack of peanutbutter-and-jelly sandwiches and some quarts of milk until I can figure out what next to do? [Are there video games in parinirvana? Does anybody know? Internet access?]

Heaven, as described in the New Testament, or spoken/written about by suppositionist Christians, or mused about colloquially, doesn’t sound all that spiffy. Mind you, I am a wee bit fearful of death, and wouldn’t mind an escape clause, but whiling away centuries, eons, or for-fucking-ever on a cloud, playing a harp and eating perfect fruit to fill my body-made-of-light sounds like the kind of paradise where I would join the Rebel Underground [the Stormy Black Clouds is what I imagine their name is]. 

Jimmy Roughton, my favorite preacher, imagines himself in heaven planning a garden after death. But with God there, what work wouldn’t be “make work?” I mean, God, as He's conceived to be, can do anything, perfectly (and if “perfectly” isn’t the appropriate concept, then to the utmost of brilliant) and it’s done instantly. Why have Jimmy labor to create a garden when God can make a better one with a snap of His fingers, or just by saying a word?

The Zennists say that samsara IS nirvana, which, in Christian terms, means that heaven is earth, as it is. We just don’t see it. The Kingdom of Heaven is HERE. The land where improvements in people’s lives can be made is all around us.

My problem is I don’t want nothing, yet I don’t want a perfect [i.e., jolly] and crowded and eternal place, either — perhaps because there could be no compassion there. Wherever a better place is — on this world or on the next one — it mustn’t be static; there have to be challenges. And I require that these challenges be real and meaningful. So, is there an ultimate and excellent “this life” or afterlife place for me? Somehow, someday, somewhere?¹ Or, even a good conception of one?

I, of course, ask because if there isn’t a Utopia in store for me (or, for all of us, really), then the obvious alternative is for us all to make where we’re at, here on the third planet from the sun, Utopia. But if we do that, then it automatically isn’t a utopia.

So what’s to do!? Boring as it is, we can Improve life for others, in the circumstance and environs we find ourselves, now, and hope that that is a satisfactory way to be and thing to do until something unexpected and better falls in our lap.

And during this long, long, long meanwhile, until the tickets to Disney World come in the mail (or what-the-fuck-ever) we can hope — just hope — we’re doing our teeniest part for the good of the whole. I mean, like, what else do any of us have going for us? You dig?
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¹ Sneaking lyrics into this essay from the song “Somewhere (A Place for Us)” from West Side Story.

If you see the nice Buddhists on the road, run over them with your tank

It ain't cute

You know the Buddha was keen on the idea of the middle way. I say that, and in that way, because I think he meant it generally, conceptually, as the likely best way to go when confronted with a spectrum of possibilities.

Buddhism in its Western incarnation - let us face it - has been mostly about being nice, and, me, I’m not really into “nice.” I never would go out of my way to see Mary Lou Retton or Alan Alda or Mary Tyler Moore on TV. I consider perky to be a character flaw. And bubbly to be a bad thing. I think that cute isn’t.

So, now, allow me to put the two paragraphs, above, together: On a spectrum of awful-to-nice, I think Buddha recommended the middle. And I think that Buddhism in America is often sticky, cloying, gagging, “Hello Kitty,” sugary, diabetes-causing nice. And that we should disembowel this thing we’re on with a chainsaw and garden shovel and spray it with a few left-and-right passes of Uzi machine-gun fire.

The United States headquarters for the Defense of Buddhism is Nice! [DOBIN] is Tricycle magazine, a place of “rainbows and unicorns.”¹ Its magazine articles overflow with the usual sugary articles and smiley faces from the usual suspects, the one or two dozen people that are professional Buddhists and write 99% of Trike’s articles and defend each other to the hilt. And to defend against encroachment into their mob of dharma writers-slash-security police, Trike prints stuff like “Dharma Wars that accuses the wrestling-with-reality Buddhoblogosphere of being primitives and louts, that engage in "full-on dharma smackdown”s that draw scores of “partisan” comments.

This Trike mob cohesiveness was in force until a blow up last Saturday at a party poolside at Robert Thurman’s mansion in Connecticut where Sharon Salzberg and Pema Chodron got into a bit of a tiff. “I’m nicer than you are, bitch!” said one. “You won’t seem so when I bust your teeth in, Lard Butt,” said the other. Next thing you know they were in where the petunias were going to be planted, covered in mud, pulling hair, ripping blouses and gouging out eyeballs.

Perhaps we’re at the beginning of the end of Western Buddhism’s Dharma of Sunnybrook Farm period. I hope so. This era of entrapment in the Gulag of Nice has been a long, long dispiriting thing, with the cabal of Tricycle Buddhist Professionals competing ever more for the Nicer-than-sticky-nice-is-possible Championship, with an ultimate prize of being lifted to paranirvana on a purple polka-dotted crane while huge royalty checks from Shambhala Publishers rain down like confetti.

Here a sucky quote, that I’ve spanked out of the internet, written by one of today’s (and Trike's) syruppity Buddhism pros:

Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important. The reason it's important is that, fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn't just ourselves that we're discovering. We're discovering the universe.

My comment: It might appear to be cosmic-consciousness inspiring, or gleefully universalist, but it’s really just brain-soothing reader-scamming drivel. Thinking of yourself IS NOT a sure-shooting direct, guaranteed line to rising above the trees and seeing things as they are.  What crap the idea expressed is! Compare the stickiness above to something real in that realm: Thomas Merton’s Vision in Louisville that was printed in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, which ends, beautifully, thus [The ellipsis is Merton's, not mine, btw]:

It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

Truly, I feel I know that Merton is writing from what he knows. Is there loft and poetry in Merton's writing? Yes. But it is there to convey, as best he can, an ineffable experience, not to snooker the reader.

[Btw, I, of course, snarkily looked for an over-ripe to-be-damned quote by Sharon Salzberg that I could rip apart and snarl at in this blogpost, but instead ran into some wonderful stuff! I think that's kind of nice, but not in a nice way, if you know what I mean.]

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¹ From a comment by Kyle Lovett, at Trike.