A Nominee for most outlandish Buddha Statue… ever?

May 1, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Courtesy China’s Global Times (thanks to Tricycle’s Emma Varvaloucas, who you can follow on twitter here). The article states:

A giant statue of a gold Buddha in Luoyang, Henan Province garnered attention on Weibo recently for sporting a slicked-back hairstyle, jschina.com reported.

First posted by Tian Yichen, a social commentator on Sina Weibo on April 22, the statue of the Maitreya Buddha attracted online attention for its conservative haircut more befitting a local official than an enlightened being.  

According to the official website of the Luoyang Longhua Wonder Garden where the styled Buddha resides, the statue was made in the likeness of the garden’s founder. 

Netizens were divided on the statue’s hairdo, with some feeling it inappropriate while others welcome the Buddha’s updated image.

It’s worth noting (and repeating ad nauseum perhaps)  that this is NOT supposed to represent the historical Buddha. It is an East Asian representation of Maitreya – a quite different one from that found in the Greek-influenced art of Gandhara. The image represents Hotei (Japanese) or Budai/Putai (Chinese); and in this case a theme park entrepreneur. As Alan Sponberg writes in an entry on Maitreya for Robert Buzwell’s (excellent and completely unaffordable) Encyclopedia of Buddhism:

East Asian Buddhists also recognize Maitreya in a particularly graceful form as the bodhisattva appearing in the lovely “pensive prince” pose and also as the “laughing buddha” ubiquitously encountered in the entryway of Chinese monasteries (and restaurants), the latter form based on the semihistorical sixth-century monk Putai, who was especially loved for his kindness to children.

Perhaps Putai also appreciated cigarettes, or at least he appears to have in this photo I took in a market north of Taipai in 2010.

What do you think? Is it sacrilege to portray Maitreya with slicked-back hair or a cigarette? Is it ‘keeping up with the times’? Would you react differently if these were in a shop in London or Los Angeles?

Filed Under: Buddhism, China, Commodification, Travels Leave a Comment

Buddha’s Middle Way on Technology

February 27, 2013 By 10 Comments

On Monday I had a wonderful evening at an event bringing academia and the community together, featuring none other than my wonderful girlfriend, Ms. Emily Rhodes (and four other speakers). The event was called “Whose street is it, anyway?” and it brought together the Bristol Faculty of Arts and the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC, check out their blog), a local neighborhood group fighting to bring control of their area back to the people.

In terms of starting a much needed conversation, the night was perfect. I didn’t jot down names or credentials, but the panel consisted of two men who worked with the PRSC, one as an artistic activist who has been transitioning into academia, and the other as a community organizer, a woman active in the Bristol/Stokes Croft arts scene with a strong anarchist background, Emily, who talked about her PhD in Theology work on Medieval Catholic female saints and her own outreach through the charity, One25, to Bristol’s street based sex workers, and a fellow academic in the History Dept working on public space in Soviet Russia, specifically in Moscow.

So we had artists, activists, a student of medieval saints, communism, anarchism, and pretty much everything in between.

While there were many important topics discussed, the one that caught my ear most prominently was that of technology. It was introduced by the historian as something negative: she spoke of students walking into lamp-posts as they text on their iPhones. Technology can not only distract us from the important things in our life: family, community, taking care of our own health, it can distract us from what is physically right in front of us:

Quite recently a  woman walked right into Lake Michigan while texting away. Another woman walked off a pier in Indiana. ”While [she] was definitely embarrassed by the incident, she wants people to understand how texting while walking can be a problem. In an interview with the news affiliate, [she] stated “I couldn’t let pride stand in my way of warning other people to not drive and text or walk and text. It can be dangerous.” And just last month here in England, another woman, while texting, walked into an icy canal.

This is one extreme in technology.

At what point does technology so impact the human person that it fundamentally changes what it means to be a person? Has that point already come and gone? And when we look at what we can do, does can mean ought? Is there a point at which technology so infiltrates personhood that it actually begins to weaken the species? Has technology become fully woven into the story of how humans evolve? Is that good? Is that what we want? (via paperback theology)

In some people’s cases, as in texting while driving, it already has gone too far. It will cost lives. And while we may have a rise in Darwin awards, I’m not sure what, beyond common-sense legislation and, you know, warning other people not to do this, we can do about humanity’s hedonic drive toward constant stimulation.

Then there are the over three billion people in the world who live in less than $2.50/day, and the 5+ billion people living on under $10/day. These are people for whom access to the internet and a cell phone might be a God-send, connecting them with job opportunities, community development services, NGOs, and relatives who otherwise would have been a world away in just the next province or state searching for work of their own.

I think of that man I photographed above, just outside a Jain temple in Old Delhi, India, and I have little worry that technology will be a detriment to his life. In fact I saw this all over India, people making ‘leaps’ in technology – getting internet and a cell phone before they had proper sewage or running water, and from those I spoke with, the benefit was obvious and overwhelming. One used a computer to ensure that his son got the very best education possible, another relied on his mobile phone for rare-but-precious work opportunities. There, people make the best use they can of each bit of technology. This is where our community activists and organizers saw themselves, praising technology as a generally good thing.

This is the other extreme.

One might be tempted to say that the true ‘other extreme’ lies in luddites who oppose new technology completely, but I think that such people are in fact so rare as to not deserve mention.  Or perhaps those ‘uncontacted peoples’ who have no modern technology at all, but again this is too extreme and small a group to merit our attention here, simply because they risk much chance of truly influencing our understanding and use of technology.

The middle way between these two extremes simply involves using the technology we are privileged to have (assuming that nearly all of my readers live on $10/day or more) without losing sight of their function of serving us, vs us serving them.

No piece of technology will be intrinsically good or bad. What will matter is how we use it. It is up to us. This is the Buddha’s message.

Google Glass seems to be the latest piece of technology to elicit both fears and hopes for the future. One story begins, “Call me paranoid, but I think Google Glass is scary.” Another story worries about the power of data extrapolation in the new hardware. Here’s a look at what Google promises:

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However, there is hope.

Bodhipaksa, one of my early teachers, has recently suggested that Google Glass could be a tool for Awakening. Specifically, he has contacted Google with three proposals in the hope of getting an early trial pair:

#ifihadglass I would explore how to use it as a mindfulness tool — a way of being intensely in the moment. I would explore ways, in my capacity as a meditation teacher, to harness this new technology to create a more mindful, compassionate, and joyful world.

#ifihadglass it would be to use it as a mindfulness teaching tool, plucking moments of beauty from ordinary life, creating full-immersion audiovisual haikus to share with the world, showing how every moment is a opportunity for experiencing appreciation and wonder.

#ifihadglass I would help create a future where friends and families can be apart and yet together. I would help bring about a new kind of world where geography is overcome by the electronic telepathy of Glass.

That sounds good to me, and I hope to Google as well. It is perfectly within the spirit of harnessing technology for human development, greater wellbeing, greater awareness – all qualities promoted by the Buddha.

What do you think?

Filed Under: Buddhism, Commodification, Happiness, Technology 10 Comments

Two Videos you MUST see today

February 23, 2013 By Leave a Comment

From the video:

We are traversing a terrain, which we as a species and as a planet overall have not seen before. We are facing an ecological crisis that has the capacity to tremendously alter life on earth.

Today we have not only an ecological crisis. We also have a kind of story crisis. That is to say there is something very wrong with how we understand who we are and our relationship with the earth.

Where are you? Where is your mind?

Here:

Or here:

And maybe this will help:

YouTube Preview Image

See also: kickstarter.com/projects/planetary/planetary-collective-presents-continuum

Filed Under: Buddhism, Commodification, Happiness, video Leave a Comment

Better than Zizek: a critique of Contemporary Spirituality (and many Buddhists) worth investigating

February 14, 2013 By 5 Comments

Slavoj ZizekI just finished listening to a podcast interview of my friend David Webster on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting). Knowing Dave, I know that he is a bit (at least) of an admirer of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. My own view of Žižek is not a secret. One of my most popular blog posts last year was a discussion of Žižek, who had recently given a lecture that was, in title at least, about Western Buddhism: “Zizek waxes on about Zionism, Sex, Gangnam Style, Justin Bieber, the Pope, and Buddhism.”

While I’m sympathetic to many of Žižek’s criticisms and aims, I feel that 1) his sloppiness in appropriating Buddhist thought and 2) his narrow ideological bent make him difficult to take too seriously.

While Žižek often speaks in a ‘specialist dialect’ known well only by fellow Lacanian-Marxists, Webster speaks English, proper English English (I even caught an “innit”) in the interview and his writing. An example of Žižek’s, can we say “dogmatism” comes in a recent article in the London Review of Books, in which he concludes:

The proletarianisation of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is matched at the opposite extreme by the irrationally high remuneration of top managers and bankers (irrational since, as investigations have demonstrated in the US, it tends to be inversely proportional to a company’s success). Rather than submit these trends to moralising criticism, we should read them as signs that the capitalist system is no longer capable of self-regulated stability – it threatens, in other words, to run out of control. [emphasis added]

This is reminiscent of Toynbee’s suggestion that Communism remains the last Christian heresy, literally prophesying in this case the end of unfair, irrational economics and the oncoming golden age where each man serves his neighbor and taking never in excess, but only according to his needs. In fairness, Žižek seems more careful than this at times and has, I’m told (see comments here), been criticized heavily by “Orthodox Marxists” for failing to be dogmatic enough.

Webster at this point is still much less well-known, which no doubt saves him a lot of this grief. But it also, perhaps, allows him to speak “our” language and talk about “our” problems in a more coherent and useful way. As a University lecturer, Dave is a “lower salaried bourgeoisie” (I think), meaning that he is in the world of people who, in olden days, would have been quite well-off, though not by any means rich and powerful. These days, Žižek rightly observes once you get beyond the jargon, people in lower and even middle-range professions no longer have that sense of security that they would have even 30 years ago.

The problem, turning to Spirituality and Buddhism, is that these can be mere distractions from the real problems in the world. It is very sick, but it is also true that many people getting “irrationally high remuneration” are doing no good in the world and actually contributing quite substantially to human suffering. It doesn’t take a conspiracy theory or dogmatic ideology to see this, and much to the liberal’s disappointment, Obama in America has done very little (or nothing) to prosecute the those who stole from the poor and the middle to fatten the wallets of the wealthy. Meanwhile, people are not looking squarely at these and other problems and fighting to correct them, but are instead pouring their time and money into new spiritual practices, quite often including aspects of Buddhism.

We don’t complain to our managers (and union reps) when our job becomes overly demanding and pay and benefits are cut. Instead we join a meditation group or pick up yoga or talk to a psychic, or all three.

Webster suggests that traditional religions at least encourage commitment, an important virtue in contemporary life where this “buffet style”

Dispirited

spirituality allows one to become lost in endless choices and details. Commitment demands a degree of interaction with others, with real human beings, and a kind of self-transformation that is all too lacking in the consumeristic quarters of contemporary spirituality.

However, I find that it is all too often a commitment that comes at the expense of our natural “fellow feeling” (to follow Smith) or “respect” (as Kant put it) for other human beings – the ones outside of our religion. While Webster appreciates this open quest for Truth found within committed religious circles, I am a bit leery of the Truth each one comes up with. So a little lack of commitment or agnosticism is quite okay, as long as you see yourself as trying to go beyond the limits of your faith, from within the faith (if that sounds Hegelian to you, it’s because it is).

Part of my Buddhist-Kantian faith is that Truth is discoverable, but it’s not likely to be found, word for word, in the doctrines and dogmas of any of the World religions (except of course in Buddhism and Kant’s philosophy – j/k). I find myself as something of a committed Buddhist-Kantian, which might suggest to some that I’m not really committed to either, or that I’m committed to both, or, as I like to think of it, committed to each in a mutually critical fashion. In fact I would say that the only true Buddhist was the Buddha, in the sense that everyone else who came to Buddhism brought baggage. If we try to ignore that baggage, as some suggest, we simply become blind to it and it ends up coloring Buddhism for us it its own image. Great Buddhist teachers simply learn to use that baggage to connect Buddhism to similar baggage-carriers.

In any case, for a critique of contemporary spirituality, including much of Western Buddhism, Webster offers a far clearer analysis than Žižek of what is wrong and how to go about fixing it. You can listen to the CBC podcast here or see my full review of Webster’s latest book, Dispirited, here. Dave also recently did an interview with Ted Meissner at the Secular Buddhist – so keep an eye on that site for what is sure to be a more focused discussion.

Filed Under: Academia, American Buddhism, Commodification, Happiness, Western Philosophy 5 Comments
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