Musings

I’m excited about this O-naugeration today. In a year of little but bad news, this is a real ray of hope. I have been amazed at how, wherever I go around the country--and even in Europe and Japan, Nepal, and India, my usual beat--the young people are absolutely enthused, inspired, and increasingly engaged,  something I haven’t seen at this near fever pitch since the Sixties.  I’ve been surprised and delighted to see the number of young people—students, mostly—who’ve headed to D.C. for the big events this week. A number of my peers and colleagues have gone too. I’m meditating on this. Obama...

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Last night I was looking through one of my favorite old books, Leo Tolstoy's last major work, called "A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul". Count Tolstoy, the great novelist and utopian thinker and community builder, spent fifteen years compiling it, beginning in the early years of the first decade of the twentieth century. For January 1, to begin his tome, we find Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre." The book is filled with what Count Tolstoy intended to be "collected wisdom of the centuries...

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The Dalai Lama of Tibet is in the USA these days, speaking at universities and teaching publicly at venues including Radio City Music Hall in New York City. "Human intelligence is something of great potential," he told a rapt audience of several thousand at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. "Education opens that potential, so it's extremely important. Now I really like today's three words: listen, learn, love." His hearty message is always one of peace and harmony, tolerance and reconciliation coupled with a constant call for and commitment for human rights and universal responsibility for our human...

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Tonight I was a guest on The Colbert Report tv show on Comedy Central channel, and Stephen Colbert asked me why Obama should become a Buddhist now that he’s left his church. (View the July 14 show with Lama Surya Das.) There are actually TWELVE OFFICIAL REASONS WHY OBAMA SHOULD BECOME A BUDDHIST 12. Buddhists have more fun. 11. It’d be great to have a president for once who practiced right speech, right actions, right intentions and right livelihood, as Buddha taught. 10. I’d call him Head Lama Obama. 9. All the best people are. My religion is the best and the only way,...

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(This is Karmapa’s mantra prayer: BuddhaActivityMaster, heed me, help me, think of us!) A few dozen of us attended a Western Buddhist teachers audience and meeting with the Seventeenth Karmapa Lama in Seattle Thursday, May 29. Afterward, I joked with Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche (the organizer and principal host for this first American visit) about how, immediately after being with this charismatic young Karmapa 17, I’d had the irrational thought that he was even greater then the last one – but how could anyone be greater than the greatly renowned and profound Sixteenth? And he said, "My father...

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My young friend Raffie had his bar mitzvah last weekend in LA, mainly to keep his Dad's side of the family happy. It turned out to be an Orthodox Chabad service in a rented upstairs room at the Best Western, attended mainly by family and a few others in order to make up a minyan -- the requisite ten men traditionally required for Jewish prayer services. Men and women sat separately. There was two and a half hours almost entirely in Hebrew, and aliyahs (blessings read aloud) which seemed to deal extensively with which offences merit stoning along with other topical issues like the constraints on wearing...

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I took my eleven year old next door neighbor to the Boston marathon finish line today, and we had a great time. Hundreds of thousands of people lined Boylston Street, right in the heart of town where the Boston Public Library-- first in America-- and the Trinity Church stand. The end of the women's race was especially exciting, with a youthful 22 year old African girl running away from the Russian champion (winner of last years marathon here) after running side by side for miles and miles. My brother the mad scientist ran in this race once or twice, and I met him near the end. At the time I thought:...

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I happened to be driving into Manhattan Friday for our traditional tristate-area Miller family Passover weekend, when my motorcade ran into the Pope's. (Mine was a lot smaller, Buddhist-style.) When did religion start to need all the pomp and circumstance, I wonder? Was it or is it when we lose sight of the spirit and need the worldly trappings to remember to experience the spiritual splendor and magnificence which is never far from us? I didn't mind, having read that Benedict was, for the first time in history, visiting a synagogue in the New York -- the first time for any Pontiff in the New World....

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A Startling Contrast I've just returned from conducting a meditation retreat in Southern California at Joshua Tree National Park, where the desert is blooming and sprinkled liberally with native turquoise pieces where I took my daily walks. As often happens, when returning from the news fast that occurs while away on a silent meditation retreat in the wilderness, I found it a startling contrast to face the frightening news of China's renewed crackdown on protesters in the normally peaceful lands of the Tibetan people. After the retreat I traveled to San Francisco for a Buddhist teachers' meeting,...

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My late friend Brother Wayne Teasdale, who died a couple of years ago from cancer, wrote: “We are at the dawn of a new consciousness, a radically fresh approach to our life as the human family in a fragile world. This birth into a new awareness, into a new set of historical circumstances, appears in a number of shifts in our understanding: The emergence of ecological awareness and sensitivity to the natural organic world, with an acknowledgment of the basic fragility of the earth. A growing sense of the rights of other species. A recognition of the interdependence of all domains of life...

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