Flying Spaghetti Monster

True, we Buddhists don’t tend to entertain the idea of God or the Prime Mover or — as the 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury called it — That Than Which Nothing Greater Can Be Conceived. (Or to put it more plainly: the greatest thing you can conceive of, plus one.) In fact, many of us have discovered that the most effective technique for squelching annoying grandstanders in dharma discussion groups is to ask, in an appropriately puzzled tone of voice: “But isn’t what you’re saying a little — theistic???”

Wham! That withers them.

But as Shambhalians, we’re supposed to welcome comers from all faiths. And besides, I’ve recently come across an especially compelling Prime Mover — a God of wit and rewards. His name is the Flying Spaghetti Monster and his prophet is Bobby Henderson, a recent, unemployed physics graduate from the University of Oregon. His Word is sweeping the globe, from Vancouver to Oxford to Australia– and no, I’m not making this up.

Henderson began spreading his particular good news six months ago through a letter to the Kansas school board, which was considering the teaching of Intelligent Design. For those of you who haven’t kept up with the latest embarrassing American controversy: Intelligent Design is a version of Creationism, which, of course, states that God created the world and that evolution is heresy. According to Intelligent Design, the world is too complex to be the result of natural selection and therefore must have been deliberately created by an intelligent sentient being — i.e., God.

In his letter – which, along with some terrific FSM artwork and photos is posted on http://www.venganza.org/ – Henderson demanded that the Flying Spaghetti Monster creation theory be taught in high school biology, besides evolution and Intelligent Design.

“One third time for Intelligent Design,’’ he wrote. “One third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.”

What looks like overwhelming evolutionary evidence, he added, is only the result of the invisible Flying Spaghetti Monster peering over scientists’ shoulders and messing with results with his “noodly appendage.”

In one of those internet serendipities, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster took off. Lots of scientists with Ph.Ds have written in, endorsing FSMonsterism and confirming that it is every bit as scientifically provable as Intelligent Design. Ever-growing hordes of followers, or Pastaferians – from North Carolina, Oxford University and Sydney, Australia — have sent in photos of their FSM gatherings, a.k.a. beer parties. (The FSM has promised that heaven will include a beer volcano.) A plush Flying Spaghetti Monster toy recently sold on Ebay for $510.

And Henderson isn’t looking for a job anymore. He’s writing a book on the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, due out in February.

How does Shambhala fit in? It’s obvious, isn’t it? Envelope them. Get them to do Shambhala Training. Urge them to begin their drinking parties with five minutes of sitting.

Really, this is too big to miss out on.

Running

How could it happen that we’ve never watched marathon runners? After all these years in these cities where nobody but the Buddhists sit still. In Boulder, where people routinely run – race! – up Flagstaff, and in New York, where runners circumambulate the Central Park reservoir through snowstorms, and Halifax – well, Halifax isn’t all that notably athletic, really, despite the good biking.

Anyway, I actually roused myself Sunday morning, dusted off our 10-speed, carried it down four flights of narrow stairs and pedaled like crazy to the marathon route in Harlem.

There I waited. The streets were lined with people, all right, but there was plenty of room. The lines were only one or two deep, with wide gaps. Police officers kept pushing the crowd back, but we kept inching forward. Several times I had to duck back a few steps to keep from grazing a lean and determined racer.

The spot was 111th and Fifth Avenue, mile 23 of the marathon. The time was 12:25 (I didn’t exactly awaken too early). By my figuring – and that of the spectators I asked – the Sakyong ought to be passing by any time.

Meanwhile, a whole slew of other runners were. They weren’t packed together, like they are when they cross the Verrazano bridge. But they were loping along pretty thickly. Mostly men – the women had either passed or were on their way. (Women start the race before the men.) Most of them had drawn faces – muscles tight with effort. Their arms were pumping. But their legs were most obviously stressed – long corded tendons like ukulele strings. Mouths open but tight. It looked like they were pumping in the air – in! out! Gasp! In! out!

They came from all over. Some wore t-shirts that said France, Mexico, Barcelona, Kiwi, Down Under.

You know, it was really moving. They were putting out so much effort – an unimaginable amount. And everybody watching them up there in Harlem and back downtown and over in Brooklyn and Queens was urging them to keep going – keep running! Don’t stop! You can do it! They were yelling. They were clapping. Such good will, good heart.

I kept leaning forward and looking for the Sakyong. He had to be there. I was so excited! I knew a racer! And I was – really – so impressed that the Sakyong had expended the effort to run marathons, and to run in this one.

I watched and watched and I felt tears prickle my eyes. Runners kept running past – pumping legs, sweaty jaws set determinedly. Go! Go! Go!

Finally, around 1:15, I realized I must have missed him somehow. I climbed back on my bike and headed to 59th Street, Central Park South, where the race was due to end.

Mistake. It was like trying to bike through the Macy’s Day parade. It was jammed solid. Yes, the runners were pounding south on Central Park – but I couldn’t see any. All I could see was one zillion other people like me and all I could hear was some really loud rock band.

But the Sakyong was done by then. He was somewhere over on 69th Street by Central Park and he’d run his race and done very well – 3 hours, 25 minutes. For reference, the winning man, a Kenyan named Paul Tergat, finished in 2 hours and 9 minutes, and the winning woman, Jelena Prokocuka, from Latvia, in 2 hours and 24 minutes. Ginette Bedard, a 72-year-old naturalized American from France, finished in 3 hours, 46 minutes.

Here and there, on the way home, biking up Broadway on the West Side, I passed some runners. You could tell – they all had a metallic New York City Marathon blanket around their shoulders, and were smiling in a kind of dazed and exhausted way.

I like to avoid Shambhala words because they're just so over used. But right now, they work. The marathon was inspiring. It was uplifting. Maybe I’ll even think about going for a little jog tonight.

The Sakyong’s new book is out and all power to it

The cover looks good — a lean-looking Sakyong with a Mona Lisa smile against a warm brown background. True, a couple of friends – a Zen practitioner, an eclectic Buddhist and a Shambhalian who rarely comes around anymore — find the title off-putting. (In case you’re just emerging from a coma or a year-long solitary retreat, it is: Ruling Your World: Ancient Strategies for Modern Living.)

But I rather like it. Usually, I tend to be either flying apart or sinking slowly beneath a sodden weight, so the idea of ruling my world is an attractive one. (I try to keep that helpful slogan in mind: “Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.”)



Anyway, to return to the title, what’s wrong with off-putting? Plenty of people found the Vajra Guards off-putting — or worse. They were right, too. But the humor and courage in looking foolish and intense loyalty of the Dorje Kasung made them one of the Vidyadhara’s wildest and most resonant displays.

Unfortunately, after publication comes sales. And Shambhala International seems eager to lend a hand — or rather, to urge us all to lend quite a heavy hand. With barely a pause to describe the book (one paragraph out of 11) or to wish us good reading, Shambhala International jumps in to teach us — all 10,000 of us (is that the right membership these days?) — to be unpaid sales reps. That, at least, is the blunt message of the Shambhala News Service message — the original SNS of October 17, not the spoof that followed. (By the way, GREAT JOB SPOOFER!)

We are all supposed to work to make “Ruling” a national bestseller.

Why?

Well, it seems that national bestseller-dom is a basic good. Obviously. Apparently, it’s like winning or success. It goes without saying. (But wait. I thought Buddhists were supposed to see beyond success and failure. Never mind.)

Nor does Shambhala International waste any time on gentle hypocrisies. No bothering with the hope that the sales of “Ruling” will help people or spread the dharma. No genteel wishes of good reading or pleasantries about telling friends and picking up a copy or two as gifts. No blither about buying the book in order to read it or giving it to friends because you liked it.

No, this is hard-sales tactics. You buy it because the Sakyong wrote it and you give it to friends and family — lots of them — to chalk up another mark towards the national bestsellers lists.

How? Don’t worry. Shambhala International gives step-by-step directions. It’s a matter of manipulating bookstores and lying just a little.

Call every bookstore in your area and ask if they have “Ruling.” Don’t mention that you’re helping the author. If they ask, say you want to buy it — even if you don’t, because you already have twelve copies.

Buy a lot of copies. But not all at once. A purchase of one or two copies a week — at $25 a pop in the US or $35 in Canada — is optimum to “build momentum.”

When the Sakyong comes to your Shambhala Center to promote the book, buy at least one copy there. Apparently, each center is allotted 500. If they all sell out, “Ruling” will definitely make the regional bestsellers lists — which will nudge it towards, push it towards, national bestseller-dom — which will lead to “further reviews and sales.” Up and up! Up and up in an ever-profitable spiral.

It’s kind of like a commercialized version of the Three Men of Kham in Rain of Wisdom: “Sho mo! The guru says come up, come up! So we are climbing up and up! Up and Up! Up and Up!”

Now, presumably, you’re stuck with 10 or 15 copies of “Ruling” stacked on your bureau. What to do? Wrap them up as Christmas gifts.

What a great idea! I can just see the expression on the face of my elderly father’s wife, a lifelong Episcopalian, when she unwraps a Buddhist book called “Ruling Your World.” My devoutly Catholic cousin would doubtless be delighted, too. She’d probably retaliate by giving me The Purpose-Driven Life — just so I’d know how she feels.

My friends? The Buddhist ones either don’t want a copy or have their own dozen to get rid of. And my non-Buddhist friends would surely view it as pure propaganda and donate it to Housing Works, in return for a tax deduction. (Hey, some good is coming out of this after all.) There, a stranger might pick it up for a buck and read it and start sitting and wind up as an acharya. Maybe even an enlightened one. A happy conclusion.

Continuing on with the Shambhala News Service marketing tips, I find the most ruthless instruction at the very end: “You can help bring the book to the attention of other buyers by making sure that it is face out — not spine out — on the shelf, each time you stop by to pick one up. This triples the book's visibility! Every book bought through a major bookstore will count toward bestseller status.”

Now that’s a kindly thought. Stick “Ruling” face-out so that it pushes some other poor schnook’s book out of the way. Who cares about him? Let him line up his own army of followers, to march into bookstores, push other books aside and stick his book face-out for maximum visibility. We’re the meditating marketeers. Get out of our way.

Look, honestly — we hope “Ruling” does well. We hope it does very well. We haven’t read it yet – how could we? — but suspect it’s more than worthy.

We’re also well aware of how tough the book business is these days. It’s a much nastier climate than it was when “Cutting Through” was new. We know that the chains give new books a week, at most, to prove themselves. If they don’t sell and sell fast — almost immediately — they’re off the shelves.

We also know that publishers do very little promoting these days. If you want to get the word out, you’ve got to do it yourself.

If this was an ordinary worldly book, we wouldn’t blink at the hard-sales ideas. But it’s not. I’m sorry, it’s not. It’s a dharma book. It’s a book about Shambhala, the Vidyadhara’s terma teachings. Shouldn’t it be held to a slightly higher standard?

Furthermore, for who the Sakyong is and who we are as Shambhala Buddhists, the hype and unmitigated emphasis on sales tricks and scoring it big is unseemly, unsavory.

Sure, if you’re in a bookstore, look around for “Ruling.” Ask if they have it in stock. Buy yourself a copy and, if you like, give one away. It’s the hard-driving go-get’um style that sits poorly. So does the emphasis on making national bestsellers lists — in other words, on winning and scoring and succeeding and making as much money as possible.

At the risk of sounding pious, isn’t there a slogan that goes: “Gain and victory to others, loss and defeat to myself”?

Well, yes, I guess I do sound pious. Sorry, really. Still, it’s not a bad line to remember when winning and succeeding are pushing everything else off the shelves.

October 20, 2005

The idea of crossing into the bardo realm and returning with tales seems like a ghost story appropriate for Halloween, not dharma. But that, it seems, is precisely what the mother of Chagdud Rinpoche, the Nyingmapa and dzogchen master, did.

Chagdud recounts memories of her in his autobiography, “Lord of the Dance” -- the most readable and engrossing of the many Tibetan autobiographies I’ve read. More readable, even, than “Born in Tibet,” my second-favorite.

She was, he wrote, a fierce, brilliant yogini, a woman you wouldn’t cross, liable to aim her heavy metal bell at the head of any monk who goofed up during sadhana practice.

But she was primarily known as a delog – a person who dies, or sort of dies, goes exploring in the bardo and returns to tell everybody what it’s like, to warn and scare them into meditating. The book she wrote when she awoke is called “Journey to the Realms Beyond Death.” I found it fascinating – a Tibetan Buddhist version of the Divine Comedy, with “this girl,” as she calls herself, as Dante and Tara as her Virgil to guide through the dangers of the realms.



Delog: Journey to Realms Beyond Death
by Dawa Drolma, Delog Dawa Drolma, Translated by Richard Barron

But then, Dante wrote of an afterlife he imagined. Dawa Drolma wrote – or says she wrote – about a real journey, a trip without her body, which means that “Delog” is more of a travel story, a mystical memoir.

While her body lay unbreathing in bed, her consciousness was carried up on a silk litter by dakinis. There – in the bardo – she wandered around for five earth days, in a state that was both vivid and dreamy. She met numerous strangers and acquaintances and deities and saintly lamas who pop up, converse for awhile and then vanish. She ranges all over the bardo – Padmasambhava’s copper-colored mountain to many hells featuring myriad ways to torture the wicked. (Though some of the wicked’s sins don’t seem all that bad…)

But it’s not a stiff Buddhist tract on heaven and hell. It’s an oddly believable journey, with grumpy good guys and deeply sympathetic bad ones. Early on, she encounters Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, the renowned Rime master of the 19th century, sitting with hundreds of yogins and holding his bell and vajra.

She prostrates to him. She offers him a mandala of the universe. She supplicated him for an interview. She does everything properly. And how does he respond?

He ignores her. Eventually, she just wanders away.

“The lama seems to have a very harsh and intractable character,’’ she concludes. “He spoke not a single word and deliberately avoided looking at me.” (A bit later, she runs into him again, where he looks a bit cheerier and bows to her, emitting a “slight laugh.” )

She’s taken to Yama, the lord of death, for judgment. He’s not exactly reassuring – towering, with purply-brown skin and bloodshot eyes, able to condemn people to hell for kalpas without a second thought.

But besides smashing a few birds’ eggs and being short-tempered, Dawa Drolma hasn’t done much wrong. Yama chuckles like a benevolent uncle, calls her “my girl,” and gives her permission to roam freely around the bardo.

It turns out that the bardo is a bit like a college reunion. She is constantly running into old friends and acquaintances. Unfortunately, most are in the midst of being tortured, which makes reminiscing a bit gloomy.

A girl who killed a snake and laughed has a huge one coiled around her. Blacksmiths who forged knives and guns are burned, pounded with giant hammers and dragged with chains of white-hot iron. (A question: would that extend to politicians who provide arms to third-world dictators? Is that what’s happening to President Reagan this very minute?)

In fact, Yama seems to rely rather heavily on molten iron as a torturing device – pouring it, for instance, over a woman who flirted with monks.

While most of the misdeeds were not the kind I’m ever likely to commit – killing marmots or raping nuns, for instance – there was one that sounded quite close to home. Predictably, the wicked fellow was being punished by molten iron. In his case, it was being poured into his mouth. Why?

“This is the end result of this fellow’s having slyly eaten food offerings prepared in his own and other people’s houses, so that his leftovers ended up in the mouths of the ordained sangha,” wrote Dawa Drolma.

Great. How many times have I grabbed a few grape tomatoes or a slice of cheddar from the feast trays before they’re carried into the shrine room. But I won’t be doing that again. Believe me. Never.

October 8, 2005

Riffling through the net this evening, I came upon a site so strange that – well, I can’t think of a proper simile. All I can say is that I’m not making this up, nor am I writing little pieces of a surrealist novel – and by the looks of it, this website is authentic.

It’s called Havel’s House of History – www.havelshouseofhistory.com. It sells famous people’s autographs.

It also sells vintage political buttons of Communist candidates (Free Angela Davis!) and of Canadian political parties. But it’s the autographs of famous religious leaders that interest me most. There are pages and pages of priests, bishops, ministers, saints and lamas, of all faiths and denominations and degrees of authenticity, spanning the arc of realization from zero to off the charts. For each, there is a photograph – or for those figures who pre-date the invention of photography, a drawing – and a copy of the signature.

A page of the T’s, for instance, had five religious fellows (very few females on this site). The first – incredibly – is a very famous torturer: “Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada 1410 to 1498, Avila, Spain, urged forced conversion or expulsion of Jews, known for his cruelty…”

His portrait shows him kneeling, contemplating, perhaps, imaginative ways of causing excrutiating pain. What dumbfounds me is his signature. The writing itself is small and crabbed but it's enclosed in big loops, like ribbons on a gift box. Quite like the Texas judge who signed an execution warrant with a smiley face after his name.

At the end of that T page is a very different religious figure known and admired by many of us – Traleg, Rinpoche.

Torquemada

Traleg Rinpoche

He’s in red, sitting on a throne with his sadhana objects, looking ready to smile. His caption says: “Venerable Ninth Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, b. 1955, Eastern Tibet, still alive, taken to India for safety, 1959, founder, president, spiritual director of Kagyu E-vam Buddhist Institute.”

There are hundreds of others – the Dalai Lama, Bob Jones of Bob Jones U., some New Age guy named Sailor Bob Adamson, an Australian who “conducts classes in nonduality.”

But none reach the dizzy heights of Torquemada sharing space with Traleg, Rinpoche – a juxtaposition made in dada-land.