Monthly Archives: July 2011

Jul23

Kalachakra, July 14 & 15, 2011

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It has taken me a week to process just the merest fraction of my experiences in Washington, DC, attending the Dalai Lama’s Kalachakra for World Peace. I suspect events like these are called “life experiences” because it takes a lifetime to fully experience them. The Kalachakra, though an event itself, was just the beginning of a life guided by the vows taken over the three days.

So, I don’t exactly have anything earth shattering to share at the moment, other than a few more general impressions. For the first of these, I thank Taylor McKenney, a member of this blog’s companion virtual sangha on Facebook, also called Dharma Beginner. Taylor posted, “the Kalachakra was amazing! totally missing being surrounded by like minded people!” She marvelously summed up my feelings over the past week, a mood I couldn’t myself translate into words. Turns out, I was suffering from sangha withdrawal!

The best antidote, I have found, has been sharing the Kalachakra experience with the brothers and sisters of my virtual sangha. The response to the news, links, and photos I shared has been overwhelming. It didn’t occur to me how much such a small act on my part would be appreciated. I feel very blessed to have vicariously included so many people who couldn’t be there in person.

I continue to marvel at the holiness and presence of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. I have been fortunate to have met some very holy and spiritual people, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Bishop Paul Moore, and Bishop Walter Dennis. Each possessed qualities that served to draw you in and painlessly imbue in you their morality and values and prayerfulness, quite without your realizing what was happening. Each was supremely human as well, people who could be cranky, tired, impatient. People who loved to laugh, to spend time with friends, to do many things that everyday folks like to do. People who could be deep and meaningful at one moment, and childlike and playful the next, yet exude spirit and love and grounding in both moments.

The Dalai Lama is very much like this—to the power of 10. I hung on nearly every word he spoke, though half of them were in Tibetan, and I don’t speak Tibetan. I might not have understood all of the words, but I keenly felt their meaning—when they were serious, when they were instructive, cautionary, joking. His facial expressions spoke volumes. He often seemed to walk a fine line between solemnity and hilarity, many times leaping headfirst into the latter. He was particularly quick to laugh at himself, such as when he described his cough as sounding like someone blowing through a conch shell.

A scene at the end of the Kalachakra epitomized how he simultaneously planted one foot in the somber and one in the silly. Shortly after His Holiness began the concluding chants, a man staggered to the front of the stage, waving a red, white, and blue top hat in the direction of the Dalai Lama. Security swooped in and began to lead him away, but not before the Dalai Lama saw the man and, particularly, his hat, and beckoned him to the stage. The chanting continued, but the Dalai Lama seemed to have just one thing on his mind now—the Uncle Sam hat. When the hat was finally brought to His Holiness, he promptly plopped it on his head. An immensely silly thing, one might think, for so holy a man to do. Yet, it did not seem out of character for him in the least. No, it is exactly the kind of thing that makes me love him so much.

The Bodhisattva and tantric vows taken during the Kalachakra can seem daunting. There are so many of them, for one thing. But taken in the presence of the Dalai Lama, they appeared light and simple and effortless. I felt that, for him, I could do anything. I expressed the feeling to a friend by paraphrasing Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets: He makes me want to be a better person. No, she said, he makes you want to be yourself.

I’m sure I’ll have more to share as time goes by and what I witnessed continues to reveal itself to me. In the meantime, I hope you’ll join our little virtual sangha on Facebook or walk the path with me on Twitter @DharmaBeginner.

Jul14

Kalachakra for World Peace, 7-13-11

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Brief impressions of the preparation ceremony for the Kalachakra Initiation, July 13, 2011:

  • I was struck by the sight of robed monks, men and women of peace, stepping through the doorways of hockey rink walls that normally admit hulking players looking to drop the gloves.
  • The combination of being among so many Buddhists, and in the presence of the Dalai Lama, had my head spinning a bit at the beginning of the event. When my focus finally began to sharpen, I realized that the Dalai Lama was talking about the importance of concentration and not letting one’s mind drift. Did someone mention irony?
  • The volunteeers were doing a great job despite trying circumstances, particularly after the event when the participants were trying to collect their kusha grass and red strings. Thank goodness for the volunteers.
  • Looking over the heads of the crowd in the hallways of the Verizon Center, as the attendees held their stalks of kusha grass upright in their fists, it appeared like a field of grass swaying in a breeze. I emerged from the building to streets filled with people clutching their stalks of grass. In every direction there were clumps of kusha grass sprouting from hands. The platforms in the Metro station were awash in kusha grass. The clumps thinned as one moved further from the building, as the participants scattered to their various hotels and homes, to restaurants for dinner with friends and family, to other events. At my own Metro stop a mile or so away, I saw a couple of women holding kusha stalks. I was reminded of the way that plants seem to sprout up from nowhere, distant from where they were originally planted, their seeds carried by the wind, birds, and insects. It struck me as a perfect metaphor for the Dharma: Each of us was carrying the teachings we had received that day to far flung places, where it would take root and blossom. No matter where you looked, no matter how far you traveled, the Dharma could still be found, flourishing.
Jul13

Have Dharma, Will Travel

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I traveled to Washington, DC, yesterday evening, July 12, to participate in the Kalachakra Initiation being conducted by His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama. I travel quite frequently for business, and thereby have encountered just about every travel situation imaginable. On the basis of that experience, I feel safe in concluding that the true intention of the ever-prescient Dharma was to guide modern travelers.

Was there ever a thing that cried out more loudly for heaping helpings of patience, wisdom, love, compassion, and understanding than traveling by plane or train? Especially in the post-September 11 world? I rest my case.

If find that traveling is a never-ending opportunity to exercise compassion for my fellow beings. To be truthful, I used to be as angry and uptight a traveler as anyone. Every little delay, gate change, slight inconvenience I viewed as a personal affront. What did the travel gods have against me? What devious misdeed did I commit in a past life that I should have to suffer such outrageous indignities in this life? Is this ridiculously small bag of pretzels a sick joke? Imagine what I was like when flights were canceled, baggage was lost, or my aisle seat reservation was mislaid and I was re-seated between two very large, very sweaty men!

Obviously, nothing that ever happened to me while traveling was personal. My delusional view of the world, blended with my unreasonable expectations, guaranteed that I would always be disappointed with the actual turn of events. Is there anything more delusional than expecting travel to go off without a hitch?

My travel experiences began to change when I abandoned my expectations and approached each trip openly, prepared to accept whatever happened. Delays ceased to be ordeals and became opportunities. Airline employees ceased to be enemies and became fellow beings who suffer and yearn to be free of suffering and, most importantly, whose suffering I might be able to help alleviate. (A big smile and an enthusiastic “thank you” can work wonders on the mood of a gate employee. Try it out some time.) Flight crews and other passengers ceased to be objects of derision and became focal points for compassion.

My flight to Baltimore last night was delayed 90 minutes or more. The consequence? I had time to get a much-needed 30-minute back and shoulder massage. The flight arrived so late that I missed my Amtrak train to DC. The consequence? I caught a MARC train instead and saved $17.

When I arrived in DC, the taxi line was quite long and I was not in the mood to stand and wait in the heat (still 90 degrees at 10 pm). So I walked the mile or so to my hotel from Union Station, pulling my suitcase behind me. (In what reality is walking a mile with luggage in heat and humidity preferable to standing still? None.) The consequence? A very large blister below my left big toe. One that is likely to remind me over and over these next few days that I should have held onto my patience just a little while longer and exercised a modicum of wisdom.

Jul10

Competitive Gluttony

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This past Independence Day, I was treated to a jaw-droppingly disgusting sight. A dozen or so persons stood before a table piled high with hotdogs in buns. They proceeded to stuff, push, shove, and crunch, crush, thrust, propel, and otherwise cajole dozens of hotdogs into their ravening maws. (I’m sorry, “mouths” just didn’t seem descriptive enough.) A crowd of hundreds chanted and cheered them on. I believe the “winner” consumed 64 hotdogs in 10 minutes. All in all, the competitors together ate enough food to feed a large family for a month or more. I was appalled, to say the least.

It’s not that I was previously unaware of “competitive eating.” I’d just managed to avoid it. But while working out at the gym on an elliptical machine, Sports Center was on the TV in front of me, leaving me more or less captive as ESPN presented an extended montage of the Nathan’s 4th of July hotdog eating contest, complete with slow motion images of the face stuffing, of food tumbling from the lips of the force feeders, of hideous grimaces as they strove to inject that 39th hotdog down their gullets. Thankfully, the sound was off, so I didn’t have to hear what I imagined—based on the closed captioning—to be the mock gravitas in the announcer’s voice.

The juxtaposition of an eating competition with the dire hunger that is prevalent in so many places in the world is, of course, what sickened me. I think that even a starving person wouldn’t heedlessly scarf down food the way those competitors did. I wonder how someone with bulimia or anorexia would have felt watching them choose voluntarily to overeat, almost as if they were competing to do the best imitation of an eating disorder. I was offended just contemplating it.

I just don’t get it. How can a basic life function be the subject of a competition? Competitive breathing? (Actually, there might be competitive nonbreathing, people trying to hold their breath under water the longest.) Competitive sleeping? (I might be able to turn pro.) Competitive fingernail growing? (Ewwwww.) I’ll stop there.

Competitive eating strikes me as antithetical to compassion. Gluttony might be an antonym for compassion. Consuming far more than you need rather than sharing it with others is the opposite of what Buddha would have us do—which is, to give of what we have to those who need it. Bodhisattvas postpone their own passage into nirvana—the thing we all are working toward—in order to assist others in reaching enlightenment. It’s impossible to imagine a bodhisattva participating in an eating contest.

I am told that Nathan’s donated 100,000 hotdogs and buns to the needy. I’m glad to hear that, though it hardly compensates for the gluttonous spectacle they conducted. Let’s just hope those needy persons were given more than 10 minutes to eat the hotdogs.

Jul2

Buddhists Do Pray!

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Not long before posting a recent blog entry that asked the question, “Do Buddhists Pray?” I purchased a book called 863 Buddhist Ways to Conquer Life’s Little Challenges, by Barbara Ann Kipfer. The universe was definitely guiding my hand that day; I love when that happens. But I guess I wasn’t listening, until today.

In the interim, I received some terrific feedback here and on my Facebook page, for which I am extremely grateful. The conundrum of how prayer fit into my life as a Buddhist was a thorny matter for me, and the advice you shared with me really made a difference. Thank you.

Back to the book. When I finally got around to opening it, this is what I saw on the first page:

Situation: While you believe in many ideals of Buddhism, you also believe in the power of prayer. From your upbringing and background as a Christian, prayer has always been important in your life. You want that to continue.

Wisdom: Embrace the adage that “prayer is speaking and meditation is listening.”

This is what I saw on the second page:

Situation: Sometimes it feels as if your prayers go unanswered. Is there any point to praying?

Wisdom: A good way to pray is to ask that the person you are praying for receive what he or she needs most at this time. You can pray in this way for yourself, too.

No doubt, I was not only meant to buy this book, but to wait to read it until after I had written the blog. There may have been people who needed to read it. I may have needed (no, I definitely needed) to hear what others had to say, to know that I wasn’t alone. If I had read the book right away, I might not have written the blog, and none of that would have happened.

I’m glad that the universe was still speaking, even if I wasn’t listening yet.

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