Bringing a human Buddha to life

Who sits on my cushion, the confused individual reaching out for a spot of clarity, confidence, and serenity in his life, or the bundle of mental habits/neuroses that chased me to the cushion in the first place? Both, of course. I take a clear breath, hear a bird chirping in the trees, and then, unbidden, expectation, desire, and aversion all leap in to pilot my thoughts. Is this the path to Awakening? Am I doing this right? What would it be like to be free of these poisons?

My teachers and sangha friends are pretty quiet on these topics. Just keep sitting, they say. But what makes them confident that this road is the right one? Clearly, someone must have traveled it already, must have said, “follow me”, and persuaded his or her followers that this path is a good one. What was his or her life like after Awakening?

There are numerous stories of monks leading awakened lives in caves or forests. These do not interest me. If I have to move to a cave or forest, this path is of no use to me, so I was surprised to learn that Siddhatta Gotama, the Buddha, the Awakened One, didn’t spend his life in this way. After he awoke, he spent the rest of his life traveling from city to city, seeking and attracting followers, and speaking, sometimes debating, with whomever he met. He traveled the road of meditation and awakening and then came back to show others the way. Those who studied with him had the example of a living Buddha right in front of them. I have no doubt that they studied him, the way he looked, the way he spoke, and the way he acted, just as much as they studied his teachings.

Sadly, the Buddha lived and died over 2,000 years ago. All we know about him today are an unsystematic assortment of story fragments that, we are told, were originally preserved through an oral tradition (or, more likely, multiple traditions) and then eventually converted into written texts in Pali. These texts, the so-called Pali Canon, are considered the most authentic record of the Buddha’s life and teaching. Of course, given the large displacements (spatial, temporal, lingual, and cultural) that occurred between the Buddha’s lifetime and the writing of the Pali Canon, one must read the Pali account with a substantial grain of salt. But perhaps skepticism is unwarranted? Maybe what matters more is not the historical accuracy of the Pali Canon, but the reverence in which it has been held? If people have been able to use the signposts saying “this way to awakening” that are contained in this ancient record, maybe that’s good enough for me?

The next section summarizes three different sources I have examined regarding the life of the Buddha. Of these, I particularly recommend Buddha for general readers and The Life and Death of Siddhattha Gotama for Buddhist practitioners.

1. The Biography of the Buddha by Dr. K.D.P. Wickremesinghe
2. Buddha by Karen Armstrong
3. The Life and Death of Siddhattha Gotama, a series of eight talks by Stephen Batchelor

Stubborn Twig

Immigrant stories fascinate me. Three of my four grandparents entered the USA from eastern Europe around the turn of the 19^th/20^th centuries and the parameters of the immigrant experience were strongly transmitted to me by my parents. I also tried out the immigrant experience for myself, moving to Israel in the early 80’s. Since I never discussed immigration (or much of anything else) with my grandparents, I don’t know how my time as an immigrant compared to theirs, but while they were able to stick it out in a “strange country” through two World Wars and a depression, I came back “home” after just two years.

Stubborn Twig traces the stories of several generations of a Japanese immigrant family, the Yasuis. The first Yasuis entered Oregon about the same time that my grandfather opened a tailor’s shop in Duluth. But unlike my forebears, who looked (but certainly didn’t sound) like their neighbors, the first Yasuis were instantly recognizable in lily-white, racially segregated, Oregon, and while they encountered a few friends, they were mostly confronted by wave after wave of bigoted Japanese haters who would try to drive them away. Fortunately, and truly amazingly, the early Yasuis found a way to see America’s promise. Sometimes they had to this from the inside of a prison cell, and the elder Yasuis often had to reminded the younger ones (and probably themselves) that “the land of the free” might not be that day’s reality, or the next’s, but that some day it would come true.

The brilliance of this book bubbles up in several ways. Author/historian, Lauren Kessler, draws a nice balance between the larger cultural-historical forces at work and the personal characteristics of individuals in the Yasui family. Despite the hardships that they faced, the Yasuis were human beings and Kessler never loses sight of this. Kessler also uses a novel, but clever, device to organize the story by generation, rather than by events or dates. Therefore, we learn almost the full story of Masuo Yasui and his imprisonment during World War II. Then, in a later section, we reencounter the war years a second time through the eyes of his children (and, in a still later section, we see how the grandchildren come to terms with their family’s story). This pattern serves the story well because it makes it clear how each generation of Yasuis differed from the ones that came before and the ones that followed.

I began reading Stubborn Twig last March when I found myself on the Oregon coast without a book. The local library had several copies on its shelf for the statewide Oregon Reads program and I was able to complete the first section before returning to Portland. I immediately put a copy on hold at my local library, but I’m glad to say, the book has been so popular, that I was forced to wait four long months before a copy came back into my hands. Fortunately, the story is told so vividly, it was easy to take it up right where I had left off.

I can only hope that everyone in Oregon will read this book. It is so easy to fall victim to lies and prejudice. On p. 212 (paperback edition) Kessler states, “a national opinion poll in 1946 revealed that almost 90 percent of Americans believed that nikkei had spied for the Japanese government during the war.” And then I think of the lies, and damn lies, that we spread today about foreigners, immigrants, our neighbors, and even ourselves.

The Zookeeper’s Wife

I first learned about this book from a radio interview with the author, Diane Ackerman, on Science Friday (January 18, 2008). The book’s central conceit, that Nazi ideas about racial and genetic purity somehow led to special treatment for the Warsaw Zoo during the Nazi occupation, and that this, in turn, facilitated the creation of an escape route for Polish Jews fleeing the Holocaust, was irresistible. Also irresistible were the accounts of how Zoo animals regularly took up residence in the Zookeepers’ home.

The book itself largely delivers on these plot points, although the central premise, linking Nazi ideology, the Zoo’s preservation and its eventual use as a hiding place for escapees, seems overblown. The Zoo stopped functioning as a zoo shortly after the start of the occupation. Also, I couldn’t help feeling that the zookeeper and his wife would have found a way to assist escaping Jews by any means necessary.

The book opens in 1935 with a description of the animals’ morning calls driving the zookeeper’s wife from her bed. However, the relative calm of this lively morning is replaced a few pages later by the story of World War II. Nearly all of the book is devoted to the period between 1939 and 1945, and almost nothing is said about the post-war years or what it was like to live under communism. Given this focus, there is the expected, yet still revealing, description of Nazi brutality and one gets a fair idea of what it was like to live under siege, occupation, and then frenzied withdrawal. I couldn’t help but wonder, do the inhabitants of modern war zones, experience life the same way as the Poles did in World War II?

On the other hand, for all its detail, the story of the war, the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto and its ultimate destruction, and the final Warsaw uprising, were all well-known to me and I could have skipped this book, save for one thing: the unusual characters inhabiting its pages. Although the book has its tedious sections (and these are accentuated by the author’s penchant for padding the text with lists of all types), Ackerman assembles a fair number of compelling stories, some based on humans, some based on animals (the bunny and the cat turn out to be more interesting than the zebras), and some that combine the two in interesting and unexpected ways.

Chemistry alert. For those of you who would like to bleach your hair (perhaps you need to look more Aryan?), do not use “pure hydrogen peroxide”. 100% peroxide is an explosive and I’ve never seen any solution that was concentrated beyond 30%. I can only guess that the book’s reference to “pure” peroxide means undiluted household peroxide with is already quite dilute.

How to (not) Think, Say, or Do the Worst Thing

Daniel Wegner’s review article (Science, 325, 48-50, 3 July 2009) of “ironic behavior”, thinking-saying-doing-feeling exactly the opposite of what we intend, sheds light on a host of mental and behavioral problems.

To begin with, why do I drive my bike directly into a fallen tree branch when I have already decided to go around the branch? Why do cheering baseball fans make it harder for me to avoid swinging at a wild pitch? Why do I kick a soccer ball directly into the goalie’s outstretched arms when the entire net is available? These are all “ironic” behaviors and Wegner describes a multitude of situations where ironic behavior appears.

As I understand it, the current theory of ironic behavior postulates two competing mental processes. When we are instructed “don’t do/think/say/feel X”, we begin a conscious mental process of distraction, looking for something “not X” to do/think/say/feel. At the same time, we also initiate an unconscious “monitor” process that begins looking for potential mistakes. This monitor checks to make sure we aren’t doing/thinking/saying X and it keeps the idea of X alive in our subconscious rather than letting it dissipate. Normally these two processes work well together, but things can go wrong, and since the monitor keeps the notion of X alive, X is ready to pop out whenever a suitable trigger arises.

A nice example of this, and the simplicity of ironic triggers (of which there are many), is shown in Figure 3, which shows the tracings a handheld pendulum makes on a piece of paper in four experimental scenarios. The scenarios are generated by telling the person with the pendulum to “hold it steady” or “keep it from swinging up and down”, and their ability to follow each of these instructions is tested first, without competing distractions, and second, by asking them to count backwards from 1000 by threes. The images graphically demonstrate our inability to follow instructions when overloaded with a second, unrelated task.

So how can we avoid ironic behavior and thoughts? One way “we can stop thinking of things” is to make “time to devote to the project [of not X] and become absorbed in our self-distractions”. In other words, we have to give the conscious project of distraction, of following instructions, a chance. Multi-tasking is not helpful. Another helpful approach may be to relax. Striving for tight control of our thoughts, etc., may keep the unwanted thought alive to a greater extent than simply accepting an unwanted thought’s existence whenever it appears. Does this sound like vipassana?