Monday, June 19, 2006

Birthers

The traditional definition of "family," used by every culture during every age of humanity, includes only the various permutations of father, mother, child, and sibling. Every familial relationship derives from those four categories, whether it be the sibling of the father, or the mother of the mother, or the child of the sibling, or any other combination (I purposely put aside adoptive, same-sex, and in-law relationships, not because they aren't equally valid but because they, too, rely on the same categories, albeit created legally...or not) But aren't we missing another one, the one that links each of us to a unique cohort of people all over the world beyond race, religion, sex or any of the other EEOC categories? I'm talking about the one category that no family can replicate, even twins: our age. Our birthday, even better, our birthsecond frames our existential awareness on a daily basis. We share that with no one, other than the millions of our -- coining a new word here -- "birthers" around the world.

All of my birthers (6/21/51/12:01am) all over the world look at the day after tomorrow as their 55th birthday, the tail end of their sixth decade on the planet. My birthers and I work and play through the day and sleep through the nights. Some will die on the morrow, some have... just died. May you rest in peace...and you, too. Our group continues to shrink as time moves on, through, and over it. My cohort mulches the existential landscape with some wonderful successes, some incandescent failures, and its gravestones and funerary urns. The younger cohorts struggle with adolescence or colic or the charismatic allure of the next Charles Taylor. My father's cohort is loosing its teeth, walking with canes, wincing and reminiscing. Each cohort passes through its own existential filter every second of its life. Some of my birthers get caught up in it and don't make it through to the next moment, others do. What appears immutable is the growing density of that filter as the cohort ages. Eventually it becomes impervious and the last birther in my cohort will die...at the exact same moment as the first death of the newest cohort. That is as certain as the sun rising tomorrow morning. And if it doesn't, even more so.
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Saturday, June 17, 2006

Referee Blues

The US just tied Italy in a game destroyed by an incompetent referee. He tossed two Americans and one Italian, leaving it a 10-9 man contest that exhausted everyone. The Italian was rightfully tossed (accusations of jingoism rejected) because he threw an elbow into the face of McBride in a flagrant foul, but the other two Americans were the victims of an erratic and inconsistent referee who will likely not work another game in this World Cup, if ever. Good riddance.
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At a Pittsburgh Airport Bar

Trying to pull from life...still.
Trying to sketch in lines...peace.
Seeing the glass hold air
Will I know I was there?
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Friday, June 16, 2006

Love is a Ball


A Shift Among the Evangelicals

Meanwhile, here in Wolftown...

...our eldest daughter (ED) is about to become engaged to my future son-in-law (SIL). She doesn't know it yet, but we do. Just last weekend, ED called us up from NoVa, where she lives near SIL, and asked if we could meet at a restaurant in between our two homes for dinner. She loves her family deeply and sometimes misses us and the home she grew up in to the point of near despair. We miss her, too, and so we hopped in the car and joined them at Lucio's, trendy little place in Culpeper. Nice dinner, great big schooner-sized glassfuls of ice-cold and limed Grey Goose (our YD drove home while I and LW smiled crookedly). As we were leaving, ED went to the ladies room and we waited for her on the front porch of this converted Victorian home. SIL, looking slightly relieved, said "I never thought she would leave us alone!" It was very unlike him, and then looking around to see if ED was coming, he blurted out "I want to ask for your permission to ask ED to marry me." Well, we love SIL and we knew this was coming sooner or later but, when it did, the relief and joy we felt was boundless. He is a great guy, very traditional (who asks such permission nowadays?), very smart and responsible, good job, top secret clearance in DC and being paid well, and absolutely adores and loves ED.

He plans to do it tomorrow during what he calls "the perfect storm:" at the Nationals game at RFK when they play the Yankees (ED is simply MAD about her Yankees). He wanted to do the scoreboard request ("ED, will you marry me?"-- SIL), but in these modern, corporate, 24/7 info graphic overload days of electronic excess, they don't do those anymore. So, just the ring, the game, and his love presented to her on a lovely summer day at the ballpark. Very fitting for the start of a new team.

UPDATE: Affianced! SIL proposed on bended knee, offering ED a 2 1/2 carat diamond ring! Holy cow, is that love or what! But unfortunately for ED, the Yankees caved with a 9-6 lead, losing 11-6. But something tells me that disappointment is distinctly NOT what she is feeling right now. We're all so happy for her and for SIL that were the ring 100 carats it wouldn't glow as much as we are right now.
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The Circle Will be Unbroken

U.S. military opens probe of three deaths in custody

Meanwhile, here in Wolftown...

...lovely wife (LW), youngest daughter (YD), and I took a blanket to the town commons last night to hear the bluegrass gospel group Jesse Jenkins & The Blue Valley Boys [you want a link? are you kidding?]. Dozens of local families dotted the commons stretching out in front of the old library building, a wide and lush lawn of thick grass surrounded by towering elms. They stood around the edges, sat in old lawn chairs. and lay clustered on blankets. A cool breeze delivered the sweet gospel melodies to men in ball caps with calloused hands and suspenders arcing around generous bellies, ladies in print dresses and support hose, and the aging crunchy hippies who could smoke their clothes to get high. Children and dogs cavorted between the distinct groups while polite applause, its sound muffled in the open air, thanked the Boys in the bandstand after each tune. I took in the ebb and flow of quiet chatter, distant laughter, and nods of recognition to friends in the crowd; minor details without significance if they were just about this particular moment. But, they weren't; they were part of the unbroken conversation of humanity that began with our first words. Being in that dialog and comprehending its full richness is a gift indeed.
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Thursday, June 15, 2006

Buddha Deconstructed


Because a piece I wrote for Tricycle remains buried somewhere behind their firewall (I have yet to find it despite the editor's statement that they were going to post it), I'm posting it here where I have monolithic editorial control. I had written it on assignment, but the magazine felt it wasn't suitable for the print publication. I think I know there specific objections, but I'll let it speak for itself. And, they paid me, so I can't really complain. Also, next April, I'll be traveling to Dharamsala with my bro to attend a private conference led by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The conference will be exploring the the empirical effects of meditation on the science of the mind. Very cool.

Anyway, here's the piece.....

Buddha Deconstructed

By Cullen Couch

Night falls here in the cold/dry season of northeastern India. Dung fires and kerosene lamps radiate light and warmth into countless mud huts. The acrid smoke stings my eyes and deepens a cloying darkness no starlight can penetrate. Our bus, filled with 27 pilgrims following in the “footsteps of the Buddha,” bumps and lurches on a narrow dirt road. Its headlights barely illuminate the hundreds of cloaked figures, oxcarts, Tata trucks, cows, dogs, and rickshaws streaming by in the gloom. Far ahead, I see oncoming headlights burn a corona around the dark shape of a distant wagon.

The stream parts to our singsong horn – only one part in the larger road symphony of honks, toots, and shouts – and then fills in behind us. In this intricate dance of steel and flesh we avoid each other by scant inches. During the two weeks of our travel here, our bus kills just three dogs.

My brother invited me on this journey some six months earlier. It was a daunting prospect. India’s myth had never much appealed to me, and the thought of enduring typhoid and hepatitis vaccines, and downing anti-malaria and “traveler’s diarrhea” pills didn’t help. As a lifelong skeptic of organizations of any stripe – be they travel groups, corporate paradigms, or multi-mandala’d schools of Buddhism – and a devotee of single malt scotch, I feared having to endure too much of the former with too little of the latter.

That doesn’t turn out to be a problem. I smuggled some fine, peaty Ardbeg into the sangha and enjoyed a nightly wee dram. And our group turned out to be intrepid, gentle, and solicitous. In fact, these are among the nicest people I’ve ever met. But I didn’t anticipate the intense sensory overload India levels on the uninitiated, of which I truly am one. And I worried I would miss the Buddha in this addled state.

We had begun the pilgrimage in Patna, the run-down former capital of the ancient Maghadan kingdom and a two-hour plane ride east from Delhi. There, we met the bus and crew who carried us over the Gangetic plain to Rajgir, Bodh Gaya, Varanasi, Kushinigar, Kapilavastu, Sravasti, and Lumbini just across the border in Nepal. We didn’t retrace the Buddha’s steps chronologically; that would have taken months in this travel-challenged land. Instead, we followed a tilde line across Bihar state, walking randomly on Buddha moments as though they were film frames on a cutting room floor.

But now the night is deepening and a bed many hours distant. I’m sitting next to Shantum Seth, an ordained teacher in the tradition of the Vietnamese master Thich Nhat Hanh. An elegant, endlessly patient man, he steers our group through the mysterious chaos of this complex country while telling the story of the living Buddha who walked here. Shantum’s bemused love affair with his own India shines through in his every interaction with it. “It’s not important what you do, but who you are,” he says, impish dark eyes glittering over a gentle grin. “It’s a miracle that it works.”

Exactly.

This is a squalid place, often revolting in its filth and detritus and the people scratching out a meager, crowded existence. I can’t help but wonder how so many can live together in such relative harmony. But that must be my own western conceit, because why do swarms of smiling, happy children crowd around us at every stop? How can shopkeepers in such makeshift booths make a living? Why aren’t they all beat down miserable?

My fellow pilgrims come from all over America; California, Texas, Utah, New York, and elsewhere. An arduous trip by western standards, it bonds us to a shared experience. We’re all holding up quite well, various ailments notwithstanding.

Stephen and Martine Batchelor help Shantum lead the group in the tour and the teachings. Martine, a former nun in the Korean tradition and author of a number of Buddhist works, dispenses her spiritual ministrations, not to mention her scheduling suggestions, with clarifying certainty. Martine leads our meditation sessions (which for our group can happen anytime, even rockin’ and rollin’ on the bus), and she’s delightfully direct and exquisitely funny when mirth sends her high chuckle into a Gallic growl.

Stephen’s smile hangs easily on his face. He is unhurried, deliberate, even-paced. His keen wit and intellectual lucidity commands a vast body of scholarship, from the Pali canon to 20th century existentialism. He unwraps Buddhism using a scientist’s logic, unrolling his sentences with droll aplomb and lyrical dexterity. When he says, “Buddhism is something you do, not something you believe in,” it resonates.

At each stop and after Shantum tells its story, Stephen helps strip away the allegory obscuring its historical and political context. As the sun sets on Vulture Peak and village fires twinkle in the hazy twilight below, Stephen riffs on the Heart Sutra. In the Bamboo Grove in Rajgir, he unravels the Buddha’s “soap opera” life and the political component to the Buddha’s “middle way.” Sitting snug inside the hotel on a chilly Nepalese night, the occasional scream of a jackal filtering through the stone walls, Stephen handles reincarnation theory deftly, turning this central tenet of Buddhism into a mere footnote of mild interest; and karma, its lock box, into a straightforward model for individual responsibility.

Some days we rest, meditate, or walk through ruins dating as early as 300 BC. Other days we ride the bus (or, rather, it rides us), for as long as 10-12 hours averaging at best 25 kilometers per hour. At every stop we climb down and a chorus of beggars humming like bees close in, angling for attention. Cow dung patties dry on sun-drenched brick walls, each a perfect circle carrying the imprint of the human hand that put it there.

From Rajgir to Bodh Gaya we follow a road along granite quarries below a tall jagged ridge line. Men, women, and children old enough to hold a hammer pound rock by hand into smaller chunks of gravel. Green fields of lentil and mustard stretch to a distant horizon. Cattle, pigs, roosters, hens, and children amble, squeal, crow, peck, and giggle amongst thatched huts, bodhi trees, and well basins.

In Bodh Gaya, we sit under the bodhi tree amid surging crowds, cacophony, and splendiferous statuary that saturates the Mahabodhi temple complex. Nearby, we cross the dry, wide riverbed of the Niranjana and trek several kilometers along rice paddies, climbing to the cave in the Dungasiri mountains where Buddha emerged to end his ascetic period. I sit on my mat high above the savannah, a sharp escarpment to my left. Gentle breeze. Bright sun. Hard rock. Soft mat. Clear mind. The beggars line the path below. Their hum and the wind-snapped prayer flags add to the discordant sound of India.

Inside the gates of the massive and beautiful ruins of Nalanda University, the center of Buddhist learning for 700 years beginning in the 5th Century AD, I sit on a rampart in a soft breeze, transfixed by the lone figure of a boy fishing the river rhythmically in the distance. Refreshed, I follow my fellow pilgrims outside to face the din of hawkers and beggars. I taste dung dust in the back of my throat. A bout with “Delhi belly” sphincters my tolerance; the fresh mountain air of my Virginia and the sweet taste of her clear water seem so far away right now.

And as the days go by, it becomes increasingly apparent that something is missing. Here in the birthplace of Buddhism, where are all the Buddhists?

For nearly 1,800 years after his death, Buddhism flourished in India, culminating in the magnificent Nalanda where thousands of monks studied and taught the dharma. But in the 12th century, invading armies destroyed this holy place, ripping the heart out of the tradition and leaving spectacular ruins that today only hint at its former grandeur. Without Nalanda, Buddhism withered in its native country. Today, it is all but forgotten.

Except for Bodh Gaya, Buddhist sites draw only modest crowds, often in spite of government efforts to boost them. In Lumbini, by most accounts the Buddha’s birthplace, a half-dozen nations working under UNESCO began constructing in the late 70s an international pilgrimage and tourism center using a “build it and they will come” approach. Only, they don’t.

Buddhist statuary appears haphazardly on the Gangetic plain, sometimes sitting lonely in a lentil field, sometimes housed in a makeshift shrine. Had the Buddha’s followers honored his wishes not to worship him as an icon, not even these modest shrines would mark his presence; just his teaching would remain, and only as a faint echo of chants heard from other parts of the world.

And my early worry is bearing out; I still can’t sense the Buddha. With the madness of India so much louder than its muffled reverence for him, and the scattered shrines bearing such forlorn witness, I haven’t been able to crack through the idolized facades that only hide him from me.

But then I do. He is here in the early morning quiet at Muktabandhana, the stupa housing his ashes. Mist shrouds its unadorned silhouette and limns its isolation. It whispers humility, transcendence, peace.

A lone monk emerges from the fog; just a man. Just like the Buddha.

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