Musings

This morning I happened to turn on the tv seeking weather, and found Diane Sawyer broadcasting from Tibet as the first installment of "Good Morning America's" Seven New Wonders of the World Series. Between Tibetan music and dance, and drinking yak butter tea and eating yak tongue at a street stall dubbed Yak in the Box by her slightly squeemish colleague, she did manage to tell us quite a bit about the Tibetan situation vis-a -vis China, the Dalai Lama, and the new Roof of the World railroad from Beijing. She also showed gorgeous footage of the wondrous Potala Palace, home to over a dozen successive...

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I love Texas. I have a meditation retreat center overlooking the Pedernales River west of Austin, one of the hippest, most musical and livable cities in the country; but recently I was surprised to find that Houston is one of our country's best kept secrets. It too is green, friendly, highly cultured, and has world class museums in abundance as well as the historic NASA Space Center. My favorite place is the Rothko Chapel near Rice University, where abstract expressionist master Mark Rothko installed in the late sixties, eight immense minimalist paintings rich with existential resonance, all done...

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I was reading Joan Didion's marvelous memoir recently, The Year of Magical Thinking, concerning her husband's death and her daughter's long and ultimately fatal illness, and reflecting upon death and impermanence, and my own mortality. The last book that moved me so much on this subject was Tuesdays with Morrie. The historical Buddha himself said: "Death was my guru. It was the Lord of Death that drove me to seek transcendence, enlightenment, deathless nirvana. The contemplation of mortality and transience is the greatest meditation. Death is nothing to fear for those who have lived wisely." I love...

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Last night I saw the controversial Borat film, which I found hilarious, interesting and provocative. It's a combination of Archie Bunker, Andie Kaufman, and my friend Stephen Colbert's facetious approach to social commentary. I recommend it to you, unless you're hyper-sensitive about anti-semitism. Borat, who is actually a British comedian named Sacha Baron Cohen (who's Jewish on his parents' side), plays his altar ego Borat the Filmmaker-Journalist from Kazakhstan as a know-nothing first-time tourist in America -- not unlike the characters from the Third Rock from the Sun TV sitcom, who are visiting...

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I met a great man yesterday. My old friends from my Paris days, founders of the France-Burma Aid Association, invited me to breakfast at the Harvard Faculty Club, to meet their mentor Sulak Sivaraksa, one of the grand old men of Buddhism. This brilliant and accomplished activist -- an original disciple of the highly esteemed late Thai master Ajaan Buddhadasa -- is still, at the age of 73, traveling the world, promoting peace, nonviolence, and universal values, while based with his wife in the old wooden house he grew up in. He is the epitome of Engaged Buddhism. He never gives up or gives in to weariness...

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I'm at my Dzogchen retreat center in the Texas foothills outside Austin, overlooking the Perdanales River a few ranches away from Willie Nelson's ranch and several miles from LBJ's -- and noticing the low river and near-drought conditions hereabouts, thinking about natural resources and the issue of clean water in the world today. The lack of clean water is going to be recognized more and more as a problem, and there may be water wars in the world-- as we now fight wars over oil. We all know it's healthy to drink lots of water, as well as necessary for survival. Where's it going to come from if we don't...

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Nonviolence is a radical and challenging practice. It's interesting that we don't even actually have a word for it - instead we only use the negation of violence. That is how foreign and removed this concept is in our usual collective thinking. Nonviolence is not mere pacifism; Mahatma Gandhi used the powerful truth of nonviolent passive resistance to free his country from British Rule. He said, "Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart and it must be an inseparable part of our very being." Gandhi taught that nonviolence must never come from weakness...

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A mountain lion was spotted here this morning at dawn, snuffling at the garbage bin of our in Northern California retreat. All were worried; we read every year of them taking a jogger or hiker. And I wondered: what would a Bodhisattva believer in nonviolence do if attacked? Would one fight to the death, trying to kill the dangerous creature in order to survive, or not? (They are reportedly very hard to escape from by running.) The scriptures tell us that Buddha, in a previous life at in Nepal, gave himself up to a starving tigress surrounded by starving cubs, and accrued great karmic merits for his further...

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People often ask me how to get started on the spiritual path. It would be easy just advise them to learn to meditate, do yoga, pray, and/or read wise words. But in public I often hear myself saying to those who seem almost like rank beginners simply to try connecting with nature. Take a walk outside every day. Nature is the original goddess and first form of spirit common to humankind. Thoreau said that he grew rusty if he didn’t walk outside for hours every day! Whenever I see bodies of water, I feel as if I’m meditating. Nature is what we are already part and parcel of, inseparable from,...

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Last week I made my annual pilgrimage to visit the Dalai Lama, having been invited to give a few hour-long lectures before and after his large stadium appearance at my old alma mater, the University at Buffalo. One of the many things he said over the course of those three days in western new York was that prayer and meditation are all good and important, but not enough; we also have to actually do something in the world. He encouraged us all to stand up and speak out more. I have been thinking a lot lately about nonviolence and the power of timeless wisdom. From my erstwhile Concord neighbor...

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