December 3: Buddha's Old-Fashioned Christmas Special

Later the Barbary Coasters come and sing "I Want A Monkey For Christmas". In a free-from-desire way, of course.

Who knew that Buddhism had a nativity story? Buddhists, that's who, but now me also! Only it turns out Buddha is picky -- he's not going to be born to just anybody:

“The Buddhas,” thought he [that is, pre-pre-natal Buddha -- ed], “are never born into a family of the peasant caste, or of the servile caste; but into one of the warrior caste, or of the Brahman caste, whichever at the time is the higher in public estimation.

How does he know which is higher? Does he do a focus group? In any case, as so often happens, the pregnancy seems to have occurred as a result of a party:

And queen Maha-Maya, abstaining from strong drink, and brilliant with garlands and perfumes, took part in the festivities for the six days previous to the day of full moon. ...And decked in full gala attire, she ate of the choicest food; after which she took the eight vows, and entered her elegantly furnished chamber of state. And lying down on the royal couch, she fell asleep and dreamed the following dream:—

In the dream, Buddha, disguised as a white elephant (Zeus never thought of that one), more or less sets up shop in her womb. Buddha's mom's virginity isn't insisted upon -- she's already married, after all -- but there does seem to be some parthogenesis afoot. It's interesting that these religions want these divine beings to be men, but they don't want them to come from men. My guess is that, in their wisdom, the ancients knew that the average man is most suspicious of 1) women and 2) other men. So a god must thread the needle between the two categories.

And after the deed is done, there are 32 good omens. I won't go into them all, although there seems to be some padding involved, as at least six of the omens could have been condensed into one, flower-related omen. But this is my favorite: "a mild, cool breeze began to blow, very refreshing to men." Thin of an ad for Kool cigarettes back in the day. Compared to other, more showy omens like the blind receiving their sight, a refreshing cool breeze is a nicely subtle accompaniment. Sort of like a chutney-sized miracle.

Moving on -- now, we of the Christian tradition are sadly lacking in details of Mary's delivery, videographers being scarce in the Bethlehem of the time. But that's not true of every religion:

Now other women sometimes fall short of and sometimes run over the term of ten lunar months, and then bring forth either sitting or lying down; but not so the mother of a Future Buddha. She carries the Future Buddha in her womb for just ten months, and then brings forth while standing up. This is a characteristic of the mother of a Future Buddha...

Then she reached out her hand, and seized hold of the branch, and immediately her pains came upon her. Thereupon the people hung a curtain about her, and retired. So her delivery took place while she was standing up, and keeping fast hold of the sal-tree branch.

I'd hate to see the kids have to do that at the Nativity pageant. And, just to tie up the loose ends:

And whereas a womb that has been occupied by a Future Buddha is like the shrine of a temple, and can never be occupied or used again, therefore it was that the mother of the Future Buddha died when he was seven days old, and was reborn in the Tusita heaven.

They got her offstage fast. I guess that's why you don't see statues the Mother of the Future Buddha in sawed-in-half bathtubs.

October 27: The Buddha Is No Help At All

It's doctrinally correct if the bottle's recycled, right?

It is true that America in general, and Los Angeles in particular, is accused of vulgarizing the delicate tenets of Buddhism;

And it is true that when the hearer is ready, the Word is understood;

So I stand doubly condemned for not getting today's reading from the Buddhist writings:

“The question is not rightly put,” said The Blessed One. “O priest, to say: ‘What is karma? and what is it has karma?’ and to say: ‘Karma is one thing, but it is another thing which has karma,’ is to say the same thing in different ways. If, O priest, the dogma obtain that the soul and the body are identical, then there is no religious life; or if, O priest, the dogma obtain that the soul is one thing and the body another, then also there is no religious life. Both these extremes, O priest, have been avoided by The Tathagata, and it is a middle doctrine he teaches: ‘On ignorance depends karma.’

Maybe it's because when I hear "the question is not rightly put," I think of lawyers, and I didn't think Buddhism was that lawyer-friendly (one hardly hears of lawyer/Buddhists, but I'm sure there must be some). But I just don't get it at all.

Here, let's try another passage, maybe it'll seem less like something you're supposed to know on a test:

To give them here in full, however, meritorious karma consists of the eight meritorious thoughts which belong to the realm of sensual pleasure and show themselves in alms-giving, keeping the precepts, etc., and of the five meritorious thoughts which belong to the realm of form and show themselves in ecstatic meditation,—making thirteen thoughts; demeritorious karma consists of the twelve demeritorious thoughts which show themselves in the taking of life, etc.; and karma leading to immovability consists of the four meritorious thoughts which belong to the realm of formlessness and show themselves in ecstatic meditation. Accordingly these three karmas consist of twenty-nine thoughts.

Twenty-nine thoughts? What is this, a Cosmo cover line? See, we Westerners think religious precepts should only be dispensed in groups of ten.

Buddhism is too hard. But at least if I get good at it, I'll be doing better, right?

“O priests, the ignorant, uninstructed man performs meritorious karma, demeritorious karma, and karma leading to immovability. But whenever, O priests, he abandons his ignorance and acquires wisdom, he through the fading out of ignorance and the coming into being of wisdom does not even perform meritorious karma.”

Now that's just plain bad marketing. You won't catch Rick Warren making mistakes like that.

UPDATE: Typo fixed. ("tenents" for "tenets." Perhaps I should have chosen "tenants" because religious beliefs often prove a temporary shelter, not permanent housing.)

October 9: Catholic hymns, or, What could be better on Yom Kippur?

I assume that when the kid inside there takes off the costume, what you don't smell is the odor of sanctity.

A boatload of old-time Catholic hymns today -- or perhaps a tabernacleful, unfortunately not in Latin. Not that it would make a difference to me, but some reader might get a sense of why these songs have been around for a near-millennium. And pre-Vatican II babies, which I am not, might also have a little tinge of nostalgia at the Veni Creator or whatnot. (I see where the Church no longer uses the Dies Irae in the funeral liturgy, because it's too negative. Even the dead have self-esteem!)

I wish I could say more about them, but lyrics without music often seem a little dead on the page to me. This, for example, seems like a greeting card:

JESU, the very thought of Thee
With sweetness fills the breast;
But sweeter far Thy Face to see,
And in Thy Presence rest.

The last line could also be "When I take my driver's test." The old-timey translation is probably to blame, but even so, most songs that stand the test of time strike a different part of the brain than the part that enjoys seeing words on the page being pushed around in a fancy way.

I do have to note the super-Catholic opening of the Stabat Mater:

BY the cross, on which suspended,
With his bleeding hands extended,
Hung that Son she so adored,
Stood the mournful Mother weeping,
She whose heart, its silence keeping,
Grief had cleft as with a sword.

Blood and Mom. That's the Church I grew up with. When, in "Far Away Eyes" -- one of my brother's favorite Stones songs -- Mick Jagger sings about "The Church of the Sacred Bleeding Heart Of Jesus located somewhere in Los Angeles, California," I think it's not quite right. Protestants, in my experience, keep their crosses bare. It's more about what Jesus can do for you, as opposed to what you did to that slasher-film victim hanging up over the altar at Mass.

September 19/20: Peoples of the Books (let's blog two today)

Note to Muslim fanatics: please don't kill me. Note to Disney lawyers: ditto.

As it turns out, yesterday's reading (Don Quixote), and today's (Koran), both partake of that wonderful cocktail -- fire, books, and religion:

‘Yet, on mine honesty,’ replied the curate, ‘his father’s goodness shall nothing avail him. Take this book, old mistress, and open the window, throw it down into the yard, and let it lay the foundation of our heap for the fire we mean to make.’

Do they envy man for what God has given of His grace? We have given to Abraham’s people the Book and wisdom, and we have given them a mighty kingdom. And of them are some who believe therein, and of them are some who turn from it, but Hell is flaming enough for them.
Verily, those who disbelieve in our signs, we will broil them with fire; whenever their skins are well done, then we will change them for other skins, that they may taste the torment. Verily, God is glorious and wise.

I hope that it will not be considered terribly Eurocentric if I go with Cervantes' bumbling enforcers over the white-hot holy book, if I prefer the curate-cum-critic:

therefore, taking eight of them together, she [an old woman] threw them all out of the window, and returning the second time, thinking to carry away a great many at once, one of them fell at the barber’s feet, who, desirous to know the title, saw that it was The History of the famous Knight Tirante the White. ‘Good God!’ quoth the curate, with a loud voice, ‘is Tirante the White here? Give me it, gossip; for I make account to find in it a treasure of delight, and a copious mine of pastime.

To the Koran's how-to-treat-your-woman advice:

Men stand superior to women in that God hath preferred some of them over others, and in that they expend of their wealth: and the virtuous women, devoted, careful (in their husbands’) absence, as God has cared for them. But those whose perverseness ye fear, admonish them and remove them into bed-chambers and beat them; but if they submit to you, then do not seek a way against them; verily, God is high and great.

In fact, controlling for the differences in dogma, culture, etc., you might see the two readings as pointing out that the flame of purity inevitably becomes something just a fire you entertain yourself by. People can't live like fanatics forever; they are always going to be tripped up by some romance or other:

‘This book,’ quoth the barber, opening of another, ‘is The Twelve Books of the Fortunes of Love, written by Anthony Lofraso, the Sardinian poet.’ ‘By the holy orders which I have received,’ quoth the curate, ‘since Apollo was Apollo, and the muses muses, and poets poets, was never written so delightful and extravagant a work as this...Give it to me, gossip, for I do prize more the finding of it than I would the gift of a cassock of the best satin of Florence.’

It's a bit of a stretch, but another thing to note in these readings is that the curate is letting himself be subject to a different way of experience -- not only by love poetry, but also by the classical culture Christianity was supposed to supersede; whereas the Koran is trying to get all of experience subject to itself. Most of the reading is actually about property rights:

Men should have a portion of what their parents and kindred leave, and women should have a portion of what their parents and kindred leave, whether it be little or much, a determined portion. And when the next of kin and the orphans and the poor are present at the division, then maintain them out of it, and speak to them a reasonable speech.

Although that paragraph ends, "Verily, those who devour the property of orphans unjustly, only devour into their bellies fire, and they shall broil in flames." Again with the fire!

July 16: Mohammed covers the Bible

Obviously, the good people at Collier & Son wanted the Harvard Classics to be on every classy-aspirational bookshelf in the country; that's why I bet there's no fiction in it (novel-readers, as we all know, are not to be relied on), and I'm sure they felt that everything was safely noncontroversial.

And now it's a century later and we discover it has two volumes of Darwin and the Koran. Was this but the first step in Harvard's long-range plan to destroy America? (Step 2: Vietnam.) Or was the Koran merely a holy book of an exotic people most of us would never care about, because we didn't know they had oil, which we hardly used in 1908? I think the latter, of course, but it is kind of funny in a the Trilateral-Commission-controls-your-microwave way to believe the former.

Anyway, it's our first dose of The Koran today, and to be helpful we get a sura (see, I've already been to Wikipedia) about stuff from the Bible. It's basically Mohammed's free-flowing, Cassandra Wilson-like cover of some of the classics from the Great Biblical Songbook:

These are those to whom God has been gracious, of the prophets of the seed of Adam, and of those whom we bore with Noah, and of the seed of Abraham and Israel, and of those we guided and elected; when the signs of the Merciful are read to them, they fall down adoring and weeping.

And successors succeeded them, who lost sight of prayer and followed lusts, but they shall at length find themselves going wrong, except such as repent and believe and act aright; for these shall enter Paradise, and shall not be wronged at all,—gardens of Eden, which the Merciful has promised to His servants in the unseen; verily, His promise ever comes to pass!

One thing you definitely can conclude from this sura is that Islam! Has its! Excitable! Passages!

They take other gods besides God to be their glory! Not so! They shall deny their worship and shall be opponents of theirs!

The antecedents kind of float around, and it's kind of hard to follow what's going on, or what the argument is. Here's the Nativity story -- it's kind of long, but you didn't mind it when Linus did it on the Charlie Brown Christmas special, so show a little sensitivity:

So she conceived him, and she retired with him into a remote place. And the labour pains came upon her at the trunk of a palm tree, and she said ‘O that I had died before this, and been forgotten out of mind!’ and he called 2 to her from beneath her, ‘Grieve not, for thy Lord has placed a stream beneath thy feet; and shake towards thee the trunk of the palm tree, it will drop upon thee fresh dates fit to gather; so eat, and drink, and cheer thine eye; and if thou shouldst see any mortal say, “Verily, I have vowed to the Merciful One a fast, and I will not speak to-day with a human being.”’

Then she brought it to her people, carrying it; said they, ‘O Mary! thou hast done an extraordinary thing! O sister of Aaron! 3 thy father was not a bad man, nor was thy mother a harlot!’

And she pointed to him, and they said, ‘How are we to speak with one who is in the cradle a child?’ He said, ‘Verily, I am a servant of God; He has brought me the Book, and He has made me a prophet, and He has made me blessed wherever I be; and He has required of me prayer and almsgiving so long as I live, and piety towards my mother, and has not made me a miserable tyrant; and peace upon me the day I was born, and the day I die, and the day I shall be raised up alive.’

That is, Jesus the son of Mary,—by the word of truth whereon ye do dispute!

I got whiplash there around "son of a harlot" -- and, I barely had time to register the birth-pang-consoling dates (a touch I love, but then I enjoy dates also) when the newborn baby speaks, and then the sura stops the narration and is immediately off on theological disputes:

God could not take to himself any son! celebrated be His praise! when He decrees a matter He only says to it ‘BE,’ and it is; and, verily, God is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him; this is the right way.

And the parties have disagreed amongst themselves, but woe to those who disbelieve, from the witnessing of the mighty day! they can hear and they can see, on the day when they shall come to us; but the evildoers are to-day in obvious error!

(Note the Rocky Todd-ism.) The Wikipedia article says that "the seeming "disorganization" of Qur’anic literary expression.. is in fact a literary device capable of delivering 'profound effects — as if the intensity of the prophetic message were shattering the vehicle of human language in which it was being communicated.'" It does sound more urgent than the Bible, which has been smoothed down over the centuries (and by Greek philosophy) -- it sounds a little like Christopher Smart -- if it hits you right you'd be totally won over and wonder why people bother with that fusspot Paul of Tarsus.

It also sounds like something that needs a big superstructure of theology around it. Jobs for everyone -- the perfect scripture!

June 12: Krishna, lover of life and killing

If you look at it a certain way, it's a wonder more people don't kill themselves.

Think about it: masses of people without access to decent drinking water; and if they had it, they would soon find themselves bummed by their lack of access to Paxil, or Dolby Surround Sound. People in hospitals engulfed by tubes. Sad teens. And yet we all continue. There's something so powerful about having Life, so you can see what the Bhagvad-Gita is driving at when they make Life itself kind of a deity (in the first two chapters, anyway, which is the reading):

Learn thou! the Life is, spreading life through all;
It cannot anywhere, by any means,
Be anywise diminished, stayed, or changed.
But for these fleeting frames which it informs
With spirit deathless, endless, infinite,
They perish.

How can something make us drag our asses through day after day of cares and woes and troubling skin conditions (I see you trying to hide it with your hair -- trust me, it doesn't help), and yet be gone? You can see how the Indian doctrines would appeal to someone more used to the protection-racket aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

But what is just as eternal as the desire to stay alive is the use of religious scripture to justify war and particular social relationships, and in these two chapters the B-G does not disappoint.
The whole setup for the poem is that Arunja (also called "Arjun," it's slightly confusing) doesn't want to fight in this battle -- although he was tempted by the most martial sound there is, conch-shells:

Arjuna blew
Indra’s loud gift; Bhima the terrible—
Wolf-bellied Bhima—blew a long reed-conch;
And Yudhisthira, Kunti’s blameless son,
Winded a mighty shell, “Victory’s Voice;”
And Nakula blew shrill upon his conch
Named the “Sweet-sounding,” Sahadev on his
Called “Gem-bedecked,” and Kasi’s Prince on his.

(Another constant of ancient Scripture, it seems, is to give you long lists of things you don't need to know -- conches are the "begats" of India, as Diana Vreeland almost said. ) Anyway, Arjuna doesn't want to kill his kinsman, and we're sympathetic, because we don't know what the fight is about, so his charioteer, Krishna (sure, make Krishna a cab driver -- stereotype much, Bhagvad-Gita?) unspools this paean to Life in order to get Arjuna to kill:

Let them perish, Prince! and fight!
He who shall say, “Lo! I have slain a man!”
He who shall think, “Lo! I am slain!” those both
Know naught! Life cannot slay. Life is not slain!

You only feel like you're being slain, but that's just because you're delirious from the loss of blood. And as to wealth and power, don't bother your holy little head about it:

But thou, want not! ask not! Find full reward
Of doing right in right! Let right deeds be
Thy motive, not the fruit which comes from them.
And live in action! Labor! Make thine acts
Thy piety, casting all self aside,
Contemning gain and merit.

Not that this sentiment is wrong -- I wouldn't be doing all this reading unless I thought there was some savor to be found in relatively nonworldly pursuits. I just find myself on Arjuna's side a little. I want to know to whose benefit I'm fighting before I answer the sound of the conch.