I’m just beginning to get my bearings, at least within a three or four block radius of campus. I was walking down the street to the coffee shop to settle in and read the Chicago Tribune over a latte when I noticed one of those flyers that are a ubiquitous part of campus life. This one in large bold-faced type screamed Mao: Fairy-Tale Monster? Or, Greatest Liberator of the mid-20th Century? It announced the speaker, a Maoist economist would soon be lecturing somewhere in the area. Ah, I felt, here I am: in student universe.
All so delicious. I recall thinking back about a million years ago when I was doing my MDiv (Master of Divinity – the professional degree for a minister in our North American culture) as well as an academic MA (in the Philosophy of Religion) I had thought how truly wonderful this life was. If only it had a benefits package I’d never have left. And now, thanks to my sabbatical and my appointment as the John Lester Young Fellow a form of minister-in-residence that also gives me a very very light teaching load, I was back at one of the great moments of human life. Older, fatter, now increasingly grey and with a bad back; but back.
Of course I’m also experiencing it from another angle and with different pressures. Turns out the coop theological bookstore didn’t order any of my textbooks. Plus the class, a history of Zen with a particular focus on its importation to the West, which I’d designed to be a graduate seminar, I was thinking six or seven, now has an enrollment of twenty-three (or four). I had this fantasy a handful of people would show up having done some significant reading in preparation. Ain’t going to be the situation. I fear the movies I had planned on showing in order to ingratiate myself with my students will have to be deferred to several optional evening get-togethers – which probably will be much less exciting in their over stimulated universe.
The films weren’t central, none genuinely explores the meaning of Zen most barely can be said to explore Buddhism, but they did provide in various ways small insights into the Dharma. I was going to kick off with Little Buddha because it contains a rather nice adaptation of the Buddha’s life in the Tibetan version, and would give us an opportunity to compare that story with the Zen version. Plus, of course, for those of a certain generation, having Keanu Reeves as the Buddha is worth something all by itself. Then I was going to show Enlightenment Guaranteed, a small and delightful German flick that has two German brothers spend time in an authentic Japanese Soto Zen training temple. Not really about Buddhism precisely (of course one could argue none of these films actually succeed in that hope), but rather a story about brothers, failure and love that plays out against an authentic Zen background. I (heart) Huckabees is one of several films that appear to have substantive Buddhist inspiration (this could just as easily have been Groundhog Day) but I like Lily Tomlin even more than Bill Murray. (It might have been interesting to watch the first Matrix film as well, as many people see a Buddhist inspiration in it even if I don’t. Looked to me like a very clever adaptation of the Gnostic myth. Still it could have generated an interesting conversation. Sadly, I couldn’t see how to fit it into the schedule even when I thought there was going to be movie time in the classroom.) For the final film I chose the Burmese Harp, a Japanese film about a soldier in Burma who through a series of unlikely events finds himself a Buddhist monk.
Oh Well.
Life is an adventure.
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