Tengu House

Venerable Master Ghosananda

  As noted by Venerable Master Heng Sure, on his Dharma Forest blog, it is with great sadness that the worldwide sangha notes the passing of Venerable Master Maha Ghosananda.

It is also with regret that I must confess my ignorance of him during his life. I've only begun taking notice of his name and seeing some of his teachings posted online (they've been there, but I wasn't looking). Venerable Master Maha Ghosananda was the Supreme Buddhist Patriarch of Cambodia, and was nominated four times for the Nobel Peace Prize. From what I've learned of him so far, he was an amazing, wise, and - most importantly - effective Buddha.

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He died in Massachusetts at the age of 78. Here's a link to his obituary in The Economist:

http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8881498

The New National Sport

The Assault on the Character of Alberto Gonzales

I've seen a ton of blog posts and website comments about the present Attorney General, and how he should be fired over the firing of eight US Attorneys. At issue is the notion that the attorneys were canned in a political move. Evidently the firings are indicative of a massive Bush Administration cover-up, and a clear violation of everything from the First Amendment to the White House Dress Code.

Never mind that US Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the AG, and that the AG (or the President, through the AG) is free to fire and replace them at whim. He doesn't need a reason, although - for political reasons - one is normally given.

The Attorney General also serves at the pleasure of the President. Note that it's not at the pleasure of the editors of the New York Times. It's not at the pleasure of half-informed bloggers like me and my pseudo-intellectual friends. The President makes these decisions.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not implying that homeboy is all that. Nor am I trying to assert that he would have been my first choice for the job. I don't know anything about him, one way or the other. And none of that is the point.

The hippied-out pseudo-Buddhists (Mindfulness means the Democrats are right, and you're not), between calling the administration "fascist" and a "junta," are busy calling for Gonzales' ouster, and will not be deterred. It simply must happen. And here's the sad thing: It's going to happen. Bush will get rid of him, even if he didn't do anything wrong. For a president with a 28% approval rating, every little bit helps - and appeasement of the liberal left might provide that little bit. CNN is reporting that the White House is already looking for a replacement, even as they publicly profess their support for the AG (not that I automatically believe anything from CNN).

It's all part of Bush-bashing, which has become something of a national sport - to the point that most people in this country can't tell the difference between the truth and plain old BS. Even the real Buddhists in this country are happy to hop on the Bush-bashing bandwagon. My teacher, who happens to be a Taiwanese Buddhist nun, blames the inconvenience of daylight savings time on the President. "Mister Bush," she says with anger and disappointment all over her face. "He did it. It's his fault. He said so."

So when did compassion extend only to members of certain political parties, and not to others? When did being mindful mean subversion of anyone in office who didn't spend the sixties protesting and smoking weed? Aren't compassion, sympathy and basic human understanding supposed to extend to all sentient beings? Or is there an Anti-Republican Sutra somewhere that I'm not aware of? I realize there's plenty to criticize about the current (or any, for that matter) administration - and I'm not saying that Republicans are right in all they do. Far from it. But this level of bashing is clearly beyond that reason.

I'll post more on this later in the week, but right now I'm just so disgusted with the whole situation that I can't write clearly about it.

Shake Mo Ham-Head

Meet Shake Mo Ham-Head. He's a bona-fide, honest-to-goodness representative of the Religion of Peace. The Prophet should be proud.

And speaking of peace, imagine, if you will, that Amnesty International and all those feel-good, pseudo-Buddhist hippies were successful in their efforts to persuade the US government to close its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Imagine a world in which people like this guy were allowed to go free, for lack of evidence.

This guy has, as of Sunday, admitted to planning and organizing terrorist attacks around the world, including 9/11. Even scarier, he planned and organized dozens of other attacks, including the follow-on mission to 9/11, which would have blown up the Empire State Building in New York, the Sears Tower in Chicago, Big Ben in London, and others.

What happened? Well, the War on Terror happened. Why didn't he succeed in his follow-on attacks? Because he's sitting in a cell at Gitmo.

Don't get me wrong. Only a fool would contend that everyone detained at Guantanamo is guilty of terrorist activities. But at the same time, it's clear that at least some of them are. There've simply got to be people there who shouldn't be there. But there are definitely people there who should be.

So I would have to advise, if I were consulted, that some kind of hearings should be conducted to determine whether or not there's enough evidence to continue to hold each detainee.

But wait - that's what they're doing! It was during one such hearing that Shake Mo Ham-Head admitted to being a vile, mass-murdering terrorist. He played a personal role in the murder of thousands of people - and this came from the Ham-Head's mouth during his Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

It's working. It's deeply flawed, yes. But it's working. I know there are a lot of people who don't want it to work, for political reasons. Surprising, though, how quiet they are when someone like Shake Mo Ham-Head admits that it's working.

But that's not the hard part. The hard part is the same questions I've been asking all along, about the karmic consequences of the War on Terror. The questions are the same as they were with the death penalty. Really, with imprisonment in general. But how far do we take that? I mean, it's a pretty aggressive act to take someone by force, against their will, and lock them up. Especially under Guantanamo, Baghram or Khandahar conditions. To do that, and then to accuse them of heinous and virtually unspeakable acts of cruelty, is in itself cruel by my definition. But just as I asked about the death penalty - How many lives did locking Ham-Head up save around the world? How much suffering was avoided, by imposing suffering upon one who'd caused so much suffering for so many others?

Blue Update: It's hard for me to imagine what must be running through the mind of someone who, evidently quite cheerfully, admits to not only planning and organizing the 9/11 attacks, but many others around the world. While I know it's quite possible that this guy is hamming it up in hopes that the US Government will stop searching for his terrorist buddies, I have to remind myself of the conversation I had with a young Iraqi man early in the war. When I asked him what the mutatarifeen (extremists) want, he said simply, "Kill all the Americans."

I was surprised that he'd used the word Americans, as opposed to infidels or some other religous label. So I asked him, what if all the Americans converted to Islam?

He said, "Then they will die Muslim."

It is my belief that the primary objective of this Shake Mo Ham-Head guy's particular brand of Muslim extremism is to kill all Americans and Brits. Period. He doesn't want to convert you. He wants to kill you. And if you convert to Islam, he still wants you dead. If you release him and spare his life out of compassion, he looks forward to cutting your throat with his "blessed right hand".

So what does that do to your compassion? Does it have a connotation for your practice? The reason I ask is that, although I'm wandering in search of answers, I doubt that I've gone far enough in my practice to fully understand all these implications. In a world where people want to kill me for my religion (partly), am I to use that religion as a vessel for compassion? Am I expected to show kindness to someone who wants to saw through my neck with a rusty knife because of that compassion?

Get Down Off Your Damn Soapbox, You Phony

Carbon Footprints in the sand...

Okay, so ol' Al Gore is advocating a lifestyle of lower energy use and less dependence on fossil fuels. Cool! But one has to wonder, is it just us, or does any of this apply to him and his family? Check out this link, and tell me what you think:

http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=nation_world&id=5072659

Blue Update:

Seems I've struck a bit of a chord with this whole Al Gore thing. But hey, it ain't me, folks. I do get upset about the evident marriage between Washington hypocrisy and Hollywood hypocrisy. In fact, I get VERY upset. They're trying to take away our friggin' cars, folks - and they drive bigger ones than we do! And that's only the beginning.

It's time the regular, plain-ol' American people take this country back from the fake, plastic, special-interest, self-congratulatory, celebrity-fawning, where-do-you-keep-your-Oscar crowd. The best thing we can do to combat global warming is to tape up Rosie's mouth.

But that's my whole point. Middle America doesn't give a flip about these people, and rightly so. There are bills to pay.

In my next post, I'll reintroduce you to the islands of the North Andaman region of Burma and Thailand. Even with all that's going on in my life, all the cool things that are finally happening, that's where I go at night when I close my eyes and flee this American Pop Hell. Stay tuned...

   

Custody Battle Over Pizza Pan

That's not a typo. There's an actualy custody battle going on right now here in Houston, over ownership of a pizza pan.

Evidently, one of the school lunch ladies found the image of the Blessed Virgin burned into the pan on Ash Wednesday, and the pan has been on display outside her (or someone's) home ever since.

The evening news showed a procession through some neighborhood, wherein several..umm...Latina women carried the miraculous pizza pan through the streets, decked with roses, candles and rosary beads.

But now, of course, the school district (that's who owns the pizza pan in the first place) has repossessed the pan, and has locked it up in the school office.

Here's the story: http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=local&id=5071525

You've GOT to See This

Here's a link to ymonk's blog:

http://panx.typepad.com/ymonk/2007/02/greenspace_in_c.html

Normally, his blog is about Chinese financial issues. But this post blew me away. I'm tellin ya, Dear Friends, ya gotta check it out. The Chinese are actually PAINTING MOUNTAINS GREEN.

Chinese New Year

WELCOME TO THE YEAR 4705!

Well, on the Chinese calendar, that is. The Year of the Boar. We spent the weekend volunteering at the temple, in support of the Chinese New Year celebrations. I lit incense for visiting devotees, showed first-time visitors around the temple, even chopped vegetables in the kitchen.

We were even able to get a little devotion time in ourselves, but not much. I've never seen the temple that busy, although the venerables said it was like that last year too. It's good to see so many visitors at the temple, though - too bad we can't maintain that level of enthusiasm throughout the year.

I'm thankful for the opportunity to help out, and I have a much better understanding of the Chinese culture and mindset than I did before. There's much to be learned during the New Year celebrations, as these are some of the oldest and most dearly-held traditions in the vast body of Chinese tradition.

For example, did you know that the third day of the new year is traditionally the day when mice marry off their daughters? People would go to bed early in order to give the mice time for their weddings. Or, did you know that there's a monster, called a Nien, that eats children and old folks on New Year's Eve? The traditional greeting on the new year originally meant something like, "Congratulations on not being eaten by the Nien for another year"?

Anyway, with any luck I'll be able to write more on this subject later. I'm working on a number of articles on Buddhism, putting together notes for a class, and also some more short fiction, so my writing time is pretty much booked.

Anna Nicole Smith and American Misery

While doing my morning dig (surfing my favorite sites and blogs in the AM to see who updated what overnight), I find my friend Renegade Buddha's post on Anna Nicole Smith: http://renegadebuddha.com/index.php/2007/02/09/anna-nicole-smith/.

I love how RB describes sex, drugs, money and fame as this society's Four Noble Truths. They really are the holy grail (sorry 'bout the mixed metaphor) for which this society pines. But the closer we look, the more we see that kind of "success" as actual failure. Anna Nicole was not a happy chick - you could see it in her eyes. She was miserable, and she was terrible at lying about it.

One of the happiest people I ever met was an older guy who ran a bar in Alaska. He'd been there for fifty years, and had originally moved there with his young bride, back in the 1940s. Even when she passed on, he stayed there and continued doing what he loved. He simply ran his quiet, out-of-the-way watering hole. He had maybe one or two customers a week, but he didn't care. And anyone who walked into his place was bound to get his story, like I did.

That guy found his happiness, and I believe that what he had going on up there in Alaska would work well for me. Unfortunately, that kind of happiness can't be found in Hollywood, or on Anna Nicole's website, or on American Idol, or whatever. Whatever it was that made so many people want to emulate Anna Nicole, people would do well to remember that her life of sexual promiscuity and indescriminate narcotics use created a great deal of suffering for her and for those around her. When her body finally gave out after decades of hard abuse, those closest to her - and those wrapped up in attachment to her - were left to suffer even more, at the end of a tragic and pathetic life.

Dear friends, I sincerely hope that you never see that kind of "success".

Poor Little Terrorist

Normally I wouldn't post about this, but this time I just can't help it. A friend of mine sent me a link to a video clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5E3w7ME6Fs), in which a British lawyer tries to defend a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

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Now, what I’m seeing in the clip is that the guy in question had a landlord, and that landlord says he was a nice guy.

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He had friends and coworkers, too, and three of them say he was a nice guy. You know, he jokes around a lot.

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He worked in a hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan. His job was to buy the food for the hospital.

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Now, evidently, when we combine these facts with quotes from various sources about how we “got the wrong people,” and if we flash these quotes dramatically enough across the screen, we can convince a lot of people that this particular detainee – and by extension, all of the detainees at Gitmo – is innocent and is being held in contravention of international law.

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Once we arrive at that lofty goal, we can then proceed to villainize the Bush administration and all Americans, by showing distorted and grainy images of the president, scowling during some news conference, and American soldiers escorting prisoners around the Gitmo compound.

Beautiful.

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I don’t know why, but I really was disappointed to find that this is evidently the kind of junk that passes for evidence in the UK. I knew we were a lost cause here in the US, but I would have expected the British people to have more sense than that. See, here in our Sensationalist Nation, all that matters is how we feel about something. Our knee-jerk, over-emotional response is all the evidence we need. But it has become evident that the same is now true of the UK, which was a disappointing revelation for me.

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I believe that the people being arrested around the world and detained in places like Abu Ghraib, Baghram and Guantanamo Bay are being arrested and held for a reason. That’s not to say that all are guilty; I can’t go that far. But they were put there because of a very real suspicion. And I’m not seeing anything in this video clip, or in the countless others like it that I’ve seen, that shows me otherwise.

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I realize that these people should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but that’s not how it works in this case. Unfortunate? Absolutely. And are there people being held unjustly? Probably – almost definitely. But if a man is arrested in Peshawar and held for a year at Guantanamo Bay, you’re not going to convince me of his innocence by showing me how much his coworkers at the hospital in Pakistan liked him. What did Mohammad Atta do for a living? And could you find people who liked him, once upon a time?

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This brings me back to the question of Buddhist practice versus support for violent action when necessary. While violence is always wrong, there will always be people willing to do violence against others, for a vast variety of reasons. And as long as this is true – as long as there are people who want to destroy my country, as long as they plan and plot and connive to kill my people by the thousands, by flying airliners into buildings or by whatever terrorist means, then it will be necessary to operate places like the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

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Compassion, yes - but at what expense? Does being compassionate have to mean that we turn a blind eye to terrorism?

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And I guess there will always be lawyers who try to “defend” these people by starring in their own little video productions and showing us that these terrorists once had jobs and neighbors.

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Time for a BLUE UPDATE:

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From my conversations on YouTube, it would appear that there are those who would assume that my dissent from the popluar view consititutes some kind of extreme right-wing fanaticism. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

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I have absolutely no interest in seeing Adel Hamad, or anyone else, languish at Guantanamo Bay without at least some kind of fair hearing. And I do mean a FAIR hearing. But you must remember that fair also means fair to the government. It may be, for example, that some detainees at Guantanamo (and elsewhere) are known terrorists or known supporters of terrorist organizations, but would be released if they were granted an American-civilian-style trial. Lack of evidence, or whatever. This is only speculation on my part, mind you.

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My point is that, after all this time and after all these horror stories, I still have a hard time believing that this guy Adel - an aid worker from the Sudan, who chose to work in Pakistan instead of the Sudan - and was working for an organization that had been identified by the UN as a financial front for Al Qaeda, juts happened to be standing around, minding his own business, when the Pakistani authorities arrested him, for nothing at all, and turned him over to the evil Americans, who are holding him in a big, evil concentration camp, without anyone ever suspecting, accusing or questioning him in connection with some kind of terrorist activities.

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And watching a nine-minute video, in which is former "co-workers" describe him as a nice guy who joked and played ping-pong, isn't going to make me suddenly decide to stop questioning it.

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And questioning the popular position that Adel Hamad should simply be released does not make anyone a right-wing extremist. It's not unreasonable to figure that, when someone was working for a known terrorist-supporting organization, thousands of miles from his own home, was arrested by a cooperating nation and has now spent years in prison, that guy MIGHT not be innocent - even if he is being held by the big, bad, evil and scary Bush adminstration, and even if he did once play a mean game of ping-pong.

Hillbillery

Here We Go Again!!!!! Now tell me that ain't funny.....