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January 24, 2010 Tiger, the Buddha, and MeBy Robin of Berkeley
Why the Buddha was more Mark Levin than Saul Alinsky:
It's a miracle that I didn't end up like my parents. Wild and crazy, they relished their liquor-tinged life. I started down that same road myself. But by my late 20s, I was a changed person. I attribute my turnaround to two men. First, I credit my husband, Jon. God knows how we got together in the first place. Jon was like a steady and solid German shepherd to my wild, excitable pup. I hadn't the foggiest idea who or what I was. Jon had figured himself out by the age of 8. It was Jon who turned me on to the second most influential fellow in my life: the Buddha. Jon had a zillion books, and at some point I started leafing through them. One day I perused a book by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa. I was immediately hooked. The next month, I attended a daylong meditation workshop for women. A year later, I was meditating silently at week-long retreats, an amazing feat for someone who was born to chat. Now that I think about it, I started becoming a conservative the moment I picked up that book by Trungpa. The Buddha's teachings are deeply conservative. Given that Buddhism got me started on the straight and narrow, I was puzzled when Brit Hume urged Tiger Woods to switch from Buddhism to Christianity. As a Christian, Hume reasoned, Woods would find a path to forgiveness and redemption. As a spiritual seeker, I'm a big fan of Christianity. I've attended two services -- one Catholic, and the other primarily black and evangelical. I loved them both. But Buddhism is a fiercely moral path too, even though it is not God-centered. There are severe consequences in the next life for sins this time around. Act like a snake, and come back as one. (Tiger, are you listening?) Whether a person calls himself a Buddhist or a Christian doesn't matter anyway if he doesn't walk the walk. Obama's bio states that he's a Christian. But his administration doesn't exactly exude Christian brotherhood. The Buddha would never excuse Tiger's lying and cheating ways. But the problem is that Buddhism, like everything else, has been co-opted by political correctness and leftist dogma. Contemporary Buddhism resembles little of what the master taught. Today's teachers communicate a don't-worry-be-happy kind of a vibe. Curiously missing is the number-one principle of Buddhism: that life is suffering. In Berkeley, for instance, the latest craze is a Joy class, taught by a popular Buddhist teacher. Thousands have already attended the course, where Joy Buddies are assigned to make sure you're on the happy trail. The Buddhist magazine Shambhala Sun likes to mix leftist ideology with ads for pricey yoga retreats. Right before the election, the Sun published an article entitled "The Meaning of Barack Obama," which declared that if you didn't vote for Obama, then you were in essence an unenlightened boob. In the magazine's next issue, liberal icon Alice Walker blamed the U.S. for all the bad karma in the world. Left out of the equation were countries like Uganda, Sudan, Cambodia, China, and Cuba, which have some serious explaining to do in the karma department. So who was the Buddha, anyway? Was he like Alinsky, steamrolling social justice through by any means necessary? Or was he a conservative, teaching prudence, ethical behavior, and accepting the world as it is? Turning to the man himself, the Buddha (which means "one who is awake") was born Siddhartha, a wealthy prince. His father shielded him from the darker aspects of life by keeping him in his palace 24/7. When Siddhartha was in his early 20s, he begged a servant to take him outside the grounds. To his astonishment, he saw for the first time an old man, a sick man, and a dead man. His servant simply explained, "We get sick, and old, and die. This is the nature of all things." Transformed by the experience, the Buddha left the palace, spent months meditating, and one day, awakened to the truth of existence. Once enlightened, the Buddha devoted his life to illuminating the path to liberation. His teaching: We create suffering through our desires and our focus on self. One of the Buddha's more provocative statements: "Enlightenment is the death of hope." Being awake means accepting reality, not living in delusion. The Buddha wasn't an ACORN, get-in-your-face type of a guy. He admonished people to face their demons. The Buddha declared, "You cannot save another; you can save only yourself." Here are some words of the Buddha. What do you think: Does the Buddha sound like a liberal or a conservative? On faith:
On work:
On salvation:
On conduct:
On evil:
On the afterlife:
Here's my favorite story about the Buddha: A grieving young mother from a poor background begged him to revive her dead son. Not only was she heartbroken, but she feared her husband's wealthy family would punish and shun her for the child's death. The Buddha promised to bring the boy back to life if she returned with a mustard seed from a home where death had never visited. She thanked him profusely and set off for town. The young mother knocked on door after door and heard heartbreaking stories of loss. Finally, she grasped the Buddha's teaching: that sorrow is a part of life. She returned, bowed deeply to the Buddha, and asked him to help her bury her child. (Now if the Buddha were an Alinskyite, the story would have ended differently. The Buddha would have become enraged by all the social injustices and organized a protest at her family's house. He might even have sent in his goon squad to scare the crap out of them.) The Buddha was indeed a revolutionary, but his was an inner revolution. If he appeared on the scene today, he'd be spurned as a relic. This is because virtue and self-discipline are anachronisms, to be ridiculed and discarded with yesterday's trash. Faith is unpopular because it requires that we do the unthinkable: be answerable to forces other than ourselves. The Buddha taught that humans cannot escape the vicissitudes of a human life. But liberals try to shield themselves, like the Buddha's father did. They concoct an elaborate charade to obscure reality. The Left finds endless excuses for bad behavior: "He was a poor minority." "She was a victim of homophobia." But in the end, no one is let off the hook. Every one of us, weak or powerful, rich or poor, will be held accountable for our actions. The Buddha imparted a simple fact of life -- that everyone suffers. Accusations of "white privilege" are foolish because the Grim Reaper will knock on every door. Like the young mother learned, no mustard seed exists from a house without sorrow. As the Buddha lay dying, he uttered these final words:
The Buddha stood for hard work, restraint, and honor. Sounds like a conservative manifesto to me. A frequent AT contributor, Robin is a recovering liberal and a psychotherapist in Berkeley. Reference for this article: The Dhammapada, translated by P. Lal. on "Tiger, the Buddha, and Me"
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