I don’t have the heart for it myself, but a free one year subscription to this blog goes to whoever completes the routine:
Hey, Abbot, where’d you go today?
Wat Pho.
What do you mean what for? Where’d you go?
That’s right, Wat Pho ……….
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Wat Phra Keow is a non-residential Wat, or Buddhist temple, on the grounds of what used to be the Royal Palace. Our pictures do not do justice to the elaborateness of the Wat or the half dozen or so buildings that surround it and would not even if we were allowed to take a picture of the Emerald Buddha that is the single most revered item there. Pictures I found on the internet don’t do much better, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that the whole complex, started by King Rama I in 1785 is like—well, some Orientalist’s fantasy of the Orient.
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I know about as much about Buddhism as most of you would suspect of me, which is to say virtually nothing . I remember a couple of sentences from Weber’s “Religious Rejections of the World,” a couple of things Katie told me that she learned in her Buddhism course, and I have been reading Buddhism for Dummies. I do know that Buddhist monks have had their activist moments: I think the first I was aware of Viet Nam, certainly the first I was aware of an American presence there, was in 1963 when several (?) monks self-immolated to protest the policies of the catholic president Ngo Dinh Diem. And I also know that monks have played important parts in the pro-democracy movements in both Thailand and Myanmar. But my overwhelming impression is how little Buddhism lends itself to activism. If I could figure out how to cut and paste from the Kindle, I would paste in a longer passage from Buddhism for Dummies but, since I can’t, this will have to do: “If you’re committed to the Buddhist approach, you’ve realized that the only effective way to change any situation for the better is by working first and foremost on yourself.” Holy psychologizing. Neither does it mean that Buddhists are incapable of cruelty: I’ve also been reading a biography of Pol Pot. But it is worth remembering that we would have to look long and hard to find a war fought in the name of Buddhism—no pogroms of Jews, no crusades against Islam, no holy war against Christianity. And who can even imagine a thirty years war between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. Who knows if Japanese soldiers really charged Americans yelling “death to Babe Ruth?” But can anybody even imagine them charging while chanting Zen koans (“what is the sound of one hand clapping?”)?
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"A sociologist is someone who needs a $20,000 research grant to find a whorehouse." James T Farrell, c 1947. Over the years, when Farrell has been quoted (most famously by Peter Berger), the size of the grant has gone up by the spirit has stayed the same. Next: Naomi and Robert go to Patpong.