Is life a roller-coaster ride?

I don't know what life is, but I do hope that quickly after death we will each find out.

An answer you can find in old movies [for example, "Heaven Can Wait" or "The Horn Blows at Midnight"] is that after life you are on a cloud, in a long line, waiting for Angel Gabriel to let you in the gate – or not.

Another possiblity is that you are deleted. There is less than nothing after life; you are as much not around as the memory you don't have of yourself before you were born.

It can be that you pass through the Bardo, a spooky old place, dream-like and filled with potential terrors, on your way to a next birth, as a human or some other sentient being on this or some other planet or somewhere or somehow in some other universe that you could never imagine. And it can be, that your reborn self comes tagged with lessons that you need to learn from all your prior lives, bringing you pains and pleasures that you deserve.

Many of us Buddhists pull out text from some sutra and say that Buddha told us not to speculate on those things be cannot know. And what might happen to us after death is just the kind of time-wasting speculation he was talking about. But Buddha also told us to use our own judgment of what we should think or do, and I think that considering the possibilities of what death might mean is a good use of a modest chunk of our life's time.

My hope is that we find out that a life is just a crazy old roller coaster ride.

At the end of life, you find yourself in a roller-coaster car, passing out of a dark tunnel. The track takes you up and down a few modest bumps, splashing through water, then your car is brought to a halt. You then remember before you were born when you embarked on the ride. And unless you had a remarkable life, in an instant you see how silly you were in life, misjudging what was important and what was unimportant.

Just as with roller coasters in amusement parks throughout the world, there is no lesson to be learned from a ride, and you disembark at the same place where you got on. Life, it turns out, is just a stunning experience, playing with that magical substance Ignorance. We are all of us, really, this single great Cosmic Self, frozen with absolute knowledge of everything and thus incapable of laughter, love, terror or hope. It is only through Ignorance that Cosmic Self can have adventures and experience the myriad feelings that Ignorance makes possible.

While life isn't a land of lessons, we do learn things about it: It turns out that chasing after money and status is not only life's biggest time waster, it is as destructive as living a life of crime. There is nothing that one can achieve by being well off financially and being respected by others. Indeed, by taking more than your share of earth's bounty and putting yourself above others, you add to the collective pool of misery. It is only from a deeply-felt compassion for others, and having modest possessions, that a life is profoundly satisfying.

But life is not a lesson. And whether we live as a seriel killer or an ego-free saint, there are no rewards nor punishments to receive or endure after life's end. There is only this: Certain knowledge about everything, and the opportunity to ride again.

Funny thing -- or, I should say, seriously, that it is not so funny a thing -- the Roller-coaster Theory does not pick up much religious support. I think the reason for this is that religions thrive when obedience to the religion is rewarded with prizes and benefits after death. The Twin Towers suicide terrorists each had twenty submissive virgins waiting for them after their murderous crashes. Good Christians have an eternity in Heaven. Well-behaved Hindus and Buddhists have karmic rewards, which might include a next life graced with prosperity, health, and attractive physical features. And, of course, for Buddhists there is Paranirvana, an absolute end to all suffering.

The Roller-coaster Theory comes then with marketting problems. The afterlife of the major religions promise a Parential [usually, Fatherly] Approval, and with it, happiness and security. So, there is a reason for us to be Good; our life has meaning. Be Good to make the Great Cosmic Dad proud.

In the Roller-coaster Theory, you are not still a child -- one of God's children -- you are a grown-up. And while dangers and terrors and random acts of violence are for the most part outside what you can control or influence, there is no one more in charge than you are. Your life can go wonderfully or horribly, despite your will, effort and talents; there is no guardian angel to guide or protect you. And so it is hard to feel that there is ultimately any meaning to being alive.

Why be good if there is no eventual reward? At the first level of understanding, it is because you can only really be good if there is no reward. At the second level of understanding – which trumps the first, obliterating it – we should be good for its own sake: Good for Goodness' sake. That's all. There's nothing else.

But what is Good? And what is Goodness' sake? There is no one outside yourself to tell you. As our heart/mind matures, the ideal of good becomes less treacly and rule-bound. We do the right thing outside the call of reasons for what feels like [and is] a growing abundance of wisdom and compassion.

Zen Unbound found on Wayback Machine

Some of you all might be interested in this: I found some of my old Zen Unbound stuff on the Wayback Machine.

I hadn't looked for the old stuff in a long, long time. And I believe when I last searched for it, the pictures weren't 'showing.' So, it is kinda delightful for me to see my 1990's fade into history is becoming more visible.

The portal is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20060427012734/http://www.zenunbound.com/

Sac'to Spirituality Examiner focuses on spirituality and homelessness

	Picture of homeless man sleeping on a bench that appeared with the examiner.com article.

Over at examiner.com – a new website that is at the cutting edge of the evolution of newspapers into something very inquisitive and solely online – the Sacramento Spirituality Examiner, Steve Curless, looks at homelessness in our metropolis after the demise of Tent City, in the first of a three-piece report, "Helping the Homeless, Part I."

[Steve credits this blog, and its cousin, Sacramento Homeless Blog, in his report. I met Steve online and colaberated on a blog at one time with him. Since then, we've become pals in meatspace in our shared metropolis.]

In his first part, Steve addresses the distance people leading typical lives have from the homeless and how it can be "an abstraction." But, with the serious recession we've entered in deepening, homelessness becomes up-close and personal. For Steve, his friendship with homeless me has personalized homelessness.

Steve then touches on the difficulties of homeless life and the deficits of homeless-aid organizations meant to serve us.

He writes about Tent City and how it was rousted and made to disappear, at considerable expense, to hide the blight from media attention.

In his next report, Steve intends to look at what "government and privately-funded organizations [can] do to help the homeless, and [if there is] a role for spirituality to play."

I am hopeful readers of this blog will plug in to Steve's and those of other examiners at examiner.com. Certainly, I hope that readers, here, will read the wisdom in Steve's follow-up pieces on homelessness. Steve is a profoundly wise and compassionate fellow.

My Morals

Above is my result from the Moral Foundations Questionaire.

As I hope you can see, I [green] am more concerned about harm and fairness than the average liberal [blue], and much more so than the average conservative [red].

I'm less concerned about loyalty than liberals and much less so than conservatives.

While conservatives care most about authority and purity, I'm down near the liberals in that I care much less about those elements.

You, too, can take this test at YourMorals. org. The test was developed by Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis.

David Brooks knows Morality

A David Brooks column in the New York Times, today, "The End of Philosophy," is spot on, in my estimation, in explaining morality.

Here, a central snip of some of the text:

Moral judgments are like [this: You just know.] They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain.

... What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there’s an increasing appreciation that evolution isn’t just about competition. It’s also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

Hooray, David Brooks. And hooray Born to be Good, a book that Brooks does not cite, but which gets into precisely these issues. This blog has three posts about Dasher Kiltner's book: (1), (2) and (3).

Brooks does cite, and quote, Jonathan Haidt, a academician who, similar to Kiltner, also embraces "positive" evolution ideas. [My meat- and virtual-space friend Nagarjuna is a big fan of Haidt and is currently reading his book The Happiness Hypothosis.] Here is Brooks's citation of Haidt

:... reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

[Haidt's words above come from 2001, from a book or paper I cannot fully ID. The 2003 book Handbook of affective sciences uses a paper Haidt wrote where Haidt quotes himself, with the ellipsis that Brooks uses, citing Haidt 2001 & Wilson 1993. Hmmm.]

Brooks ends his column with these fine words:

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. ... it should ... challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.

I love that last half sentence: "...most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself."

Voyage into Flatland?

Synchronicity, maybe.

The writings of Gregory Schopen, an iconoclastic Buddhist academician/researcher have become a topic in the Buddhoblogosphere at the same time that a very curious article about the evolution of Christianity came out in the new April issue of Atlantic magazine.

There are things similar about Schopen's focus in his writing and the thrust of the Atlantic piece, "...One World, Under God." Both have me wondering if Flatland Thinking plays a part, restricting the understanding of both Schopen and Robert Wright, the author of the Atlantic article.

As concisely as I can, here is a description of what is meant by flatland, borrowing loosely from Ken Wilber's book Integral Psychology:

Modernity, as compared to premodernity, managed to differentiate the Big Three of art, morals and science, on a large scale, so that each began to make phenomenal discoveries. But as the Big Three dissociated, and scientific imperialism began its aggressive career, all ‘Is’ and all ‘we’s’ were reduced to patterns of objective ‘its’, and thus all the interior stages of consciousness – reaching from body to mind to soul to spirit – were summarily dismissed as so much superstitious nonsense. The Great Nest collapsed into scientific materialism – into what Wilber calls “flatland” – and here the modern world, by and large, still remains.

In his Atlantic article, Robert Wright tells us that new "clues" that "come from the modern world, and they’re all around us" tell us that "[f]or Paul, the doctrines that now form the most-inspiring parts of the Christian message are, in a sense, business tools. They are tools that let him use the information technology of his day, the epistle, to extend his brand, the Jesus brand, across the vast, open, multinational platform offered by the Roman Empire.

"To conventional Christians, this may sound doubly dispiriting. First, Jesus wasn’t really Jesus; he didn’t really preach the deep moral truths that have given weight to the claim that he was the son of an infinitely good God. And, ... those truths, when they finally did enter the Christian tradition, emerged not so much from philosophical reflection as from pragmatic calculation and other disappointingly mundane forces."

Schopen, for his part, seems to regale in discoveries that associate early Buddhism with sometimes seemingly-shockingly mundane activities for the modern era, instead of those high-minded things we associate with canonical texts.

In his review of a collection of Schopen essays called Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India Arnold Dan writes [emphases, mine],

... when reading these essays all at once, one is struck by the recurrent statement of a specious dichotomy between what religious people "actually did," and what canonical texts say they should have done. Overcorrecting the biases of his philological predecessors, Schopen insists on this dichotomy in a way, it seems to me, that reflects a problematic view of how canonical texts must have been used -- a view according to which, if attested behavior contradicts such texts, they must simply not have been used.

And,

If Schopen's predecessors have taken it as [quoting Schopen] "axiomatic" that Buddhist texts unproblematically reflect Buddhist practice (and too often, no doubt, they have), Schopen almost seems to take it as axiomatic that, where texts and practice seem to disagree, there must simply have been no knowledge of the textual tradition. It seems to me that the more interesting possibility (and the one we are more entitled to entertain) is that both practices and texts coexisted, but that despite our sense of frequent contradiction between these, no cognitive dissonance was involved for Indian Buddhists. Perhaps, that is, it is only modern Buddhologists who have made the mistake of taking canonical texts as straightforwardly descriptive, with Indian Buddhist "doctrinal specialists" having recognized all along that that is not how such texts are used. And in fact, as Steven Collins has richly shown in his works, the canonical texts themselves frequently reflect something very much like such an awareness.

And,

It seems to me that what is called for in light of Schopen's cogent and erudite work is not so much the conclusion that there is a sharp distinction between "what religious people actually did" and the texts favored by traditional philological scholars, but rather that being religious is a sufficiently complex affair that the same people who write (and use) scholastic texts might in fact be involved (and without experiencing any conflict) in practices that might seem to us to contradict such texts. What is called for, that is, is a richer theorization of the phenomena of "real religious people" and what they "actually did."

Robert Wright, in his article on Christianity, gives utterly no credence to the possiblity that Christ or Paul were anything other than ambitious entrepreneurs of a religious franchise. Wright sees nothing in the way of soul or spirit in either.

Wright writes of Paul,

[T]he origins of Paul’s doctrine of interethnic love lie not in his own loving-kindness, though for all we know he mustered much of that in the course of his life. The doctrine emerges from the interplay between Paul’s driving ambitions and his social environment.

And further,

It may sound implausible that a doctrine of true, pure, boundless love could emerge from the strategic imperatives of entrepreneurship, even when the enterprise is a religion. And, actually, it is implausible. What emerged with early Christianity isn’t really what many Christians like to believe: a God of “universal” love. The core appeal of the early church, remember, was that “brotherly love” was a form of familial love. And familial love is discerning—it is directed inwardly, not outwardly; toward kin, not toward everyone.

This is the kind of love Paul usually preaches—love directed first and foremost toward other Christians. “Love one another with mutual affection,” he tells the Romans. “Through love become slaves to one another,” he instructs members of the Galatian congregation.

This isn’t to say that his preachings offer no foundation for a more truly universal love. He often exhorts Christians to extend hospitality to the unconverted, and sometimes he goes further. He tells the Thessalonians, “May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all.” Still, he isn’t in the habit of putting Christians and non-Christians on quite the same plane. He tells the
Galatians: “Let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the
family of faith.”

Paul is treading a fine line—occasionally urging a kind of “love” for non-Christians, yet suggesting that it be a less powerful motivator for generosity than the “brotherly love” he champions among Christians. Treading this line was a key to Christianity’s early success.

At the end of his piece, Wright reveals his thesis: "people are capable of expanding tolerance and understanding in response to facts on the ground; and even mandates from heaven can change in response." The science of self-interest leads morality around by its nose-ring. Flatland thinking, eh?

I don't know nearly enough about Schopen to pin Flatland Thinking to him, but I have to wonder if his insistant contrarianism is flavored by a failure to see by the Morning Star of higher consciousness.

The Buddha's Dressing Room

A bit of a controversy is steaming away in the Buddhoblogosphere, and it has to do with what was really going on in Buddha's life.

About-dot-com's Barbara O'Brien started it with her Mar 21 post, "More Adventures in Mis-education." In it, she references a UCLA newsletter that reports on a lecture given by iconoclastic Buddhism scholar Gregory Schopen. [The newsletter article was picked up by Buddha Channel, btw; it's called "The Buddha as astute businessman, economist, lawyer."]

Schopen's lecture was called “The Buddha as Businessman: Economics and Law in an Old Indian Religion,” given on the UCLA campus at Freud Playhouse to, mostly, other faculty. Schopen is chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the university. He's expert in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Buddhism studies, generally.

The UCLA article tells us that Schopen's lecture was hilarious — delivered with "iconoclastic wit, verve and vitality, prompting frequent bursts of enthusiastic laughter" — and that it punctured Buddha's other-worldly image as an always-serene sage, above the tumult of the ordinary.

The nub of Barbara's complaint, if that's the right word, is here,

I take it that Schopen is something of a renegade scholar whose ideas are widely out of step with other Buddhist scholarship. That in itself doesn't make him wrong. But when Schopen discusses the historical Buddha's tax evasion strategies ... well, the word crackpot does come to mind.

My understanding is that there is no contemporary documentation of the Buddha's life, in the 6th century BCE, whatsoever. I believe there are artifacts that date to the 4th century BCE, but not much, if any, before that. The main body of scriptures were not written down until the 1st century BCE. There are other scriptures that exist in fragmented fashion, but none that go back to the time of the original sangha.

Here, Barbara needs to be thumped. The allusion to "tax evasion strategies" was a part of Schopen's jesting, saying what Buddha was not up to. While Schopen's research is serious, the man has a sense of humor, and it appears he went for jabs and jokes in front of a friendly audience of colleagues and kinsmen.

As for the second paragraph, quoted above, I would certainly have supposed that Barbara is right. But when you look into Schopen's writing -- e.g., detail re his books at amazon, we can see that Schopen has gathered what scraps of evidence there are to construct a vision of what life was like for those carrying on Buddha's teachings in the early centuries following The Enlightened One's death.

Per amazon, Schopen's books have these titles:

• From Benares to Beijing Essays on Buddhism and Chinese Religion by Koichi Shinohara and Gregory Schopen
• Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India by Gregory Schopen
• Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India by Gregory Schopen
• Figments and Fragments of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India: More Collected Papers by Gregory Schopen

Using "Academic Online," a service my public library subscribes to, I find these articles by Schopen:

• "Monastic law meets the real world: a monk's continuing right to inherit family property in classical India." in The Journal of the American Oriental Society 114.n4 (Oct-Dec 1994): pp527(28) and in History of Religions 35.n2 (Nov 1995); pp101(23)
• "Archaeology and Protestant presuppositions in the study of Indian Buddhism." in History of Religions 31.n1 (August 1991): pp1(23).
• "The learned monk as a comic figure: on reading a Buddhist Vinaya as Indian literature." (Author abstract)(Report). in Journal of Indian Philosophy 35.3 (June 2007): p201(26).
• "The Buddhist 'monastery' and the Indian garden: aesthetics, assimilations, and the siting of monastic establishments." (Essay). in The Journal of the American Oriental Society 126.4 (Oct-Dec 2006): p487
• "Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India - By Gregory Schopen.(Author abstract) in Religious Studies Review 32.1 (Jan 2006): p65(1).

You get the idea. Delving into what early Buddhists were like is Schopen's focused field of interest. But is Barbara, really, quite right: that knowing what Buddha and his gang were up to in his off-hours (if I can call those hours that) is forever obscured? Is Schopen unjustifiably extrapolating; using evidence from a much later time, and falsely supposing that Buddha's activities are likened to what early Buddhism became like?

But wait! The great Rev. Danny waded in to weight in weightily on the topic in his eponymous blog, three days ago. In his post, "Gregory Schopen Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother," Danno hoped to be very careful. He wrote that his "sincerest hope [is] that this response will be constructive rather than critical. My intention in responding at length here is to be helpful, and what I don't want to do is embarrass, offend, or be snarky. If, in spite of my aims, I do any of those latter things, it's due to a lack of skill on my part."

Oh, c'mon, Danny. For crying out loud, tell us what you REALLY THINK!

Happily, Danny finally blurted out the truth of his feelings, writing in defense of Schopen,

Schopen's work has prompted [quoting U. of Chicago's Dan Allen] "significant revision in thought regarding the development of Mahāyāna and regarding the role of the monastic religious in Buddhist cultic life." ...

In addition to offering vital new facts to the field, Schopen has underscored the importance of including findings from archaeologists, art historians, and others in a discipline that has been heavily text-oriented. His work has also forced Buddhologists to ask important questions about the history drawn from the texts they have leaned on. Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it, BARBARA!!!

Oh, all right. Danny didn't really write that last sentence. But he did crush Barbara with fact piled up on other fact, creating a mound.

And then Jeff Wilson joined the discussion with comments in both Danny's blog and in Barbara's.

Not meaning to be snarky, I need to tell ya that Jeff and I have a history. In my Zen Unbound days, I found that an article that Jeff wrote for Tricycle had, I thought, errors of fact.

In comment to Danny's blogpost, Jeff wrote, meekly, "A very useful post, Danny, thank you for offering it. Barbara really missed the boat on that one. I can't think of any Buddhologists that I know who don't consider Schopen's work to be extremely important."

But in his comment in Barbara's blog, Jeff loaded for bear, citing his toity credentials and then writing: " Rather than a crackpot, Schopen’s works are required texts for passing comprehensive exams in Buddhist Studies, and his ideas are taken seriously by people throughout the field ... Schopen’s work is meticulously researched and referenced, and rather than cherry-pick sources, he does the EXACT opposite ... To some extent, your resistance to his findings is our fault, the fault of previous Buddhist Studies scholars, who mischaracterized the allegedly ascetic nature of Buddhism. ... Schopen has taught us much, and his evidence is undeniable. He will carry the day eventually ... . It is unfortunate that, based on one media (not academic) article rather than a familiarity with the scope of Schopen’s decades of amazing scholarship, you’ve descended into character assassination of one of the most widely respected Buddhist researchers. Also, I don’t think you’ve understood his point clearly ... Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it, BARBARA!!"

Oh, all right. Jeff didn't really write that last sentence.

Back in the comment thread to Danny's blogpost, Danny, himself, posted this: "I also wanted to point readers to the comment Jeff left in Barbara's post recently. Unlike my longwinded work ... what Jeff wrote is very pithy and clear. ... And you can just take everything Jeff wrote and put THAT in your pipe and smoke it, BARBARA!!"

OK. Yep. That last sentence is something I added.

FORTUNATELY, I then came upon the scene to STRAIGHTEN EVERYBODY OUT. Yes, I took this boatload of Angulimalas and wagged my finger at them.

Gregory Schopen is a jokester and his lecture was a bit of fun! He knows what early Buddhism [a pair of milennia before anyone called it Buddhism] was like, but does he really have keen insight into what Buddha was like that adds mightily to our knowledge (from the sutras) of what Buddha was like? Like, I don't think so!

I mean, sure, The Big B's sangha existed as an organization. And it is sure to have had shockingly ordinary aspects. Somebody had to pull tubers up out of the ground. Someone had to settle disputes over who slept nearest to the campfire. Or, nearest to The Great Man, himself. It was like that. It might, likely, not have been that different from Sacramento's Tent City.

I mean, we already know about the attempted assassinations of Buddha by the leader of the very conservative wing of his pre-nascent religion [Devadatta!], and the cut foot, and all.

Behind the scenes, things were not all meditation and vistas of bliss. We already knew this, right? Didn't we?

And I'm sure when it ALL LEAKS OUT, centuries from now, using fantastic imaging satillites that move backwards in time, Buddha and his gang will be disappointing in many ways.

For reasons obscure to me, I'm reminded of Jonathan Swift's poem, called "The Lady's Dressing Room," written in 1732. It tells of a fellow named Strephon who secretly surveys the dressing room of his beloved, the gorgeous Celia, and is shocked! Shocked, I tell you.

Here a snip from Swift's speedy pome [note that rhyming that rhymed then, doesn't now],

But oh! it turn'd poor Strephon's Bowels,
When he beheld and smelt the Towels,
Begumm'd, bematter'd, and beslim'd
With Dirt, and Sweat, and Ear-Wax grim'd.
No Object Strephon's Eye escapes,
Here Pettycoats in frowzy Heaps;
Nor be the Handkerchiefs forgot
All varnish'd o'er with Snuff and Snot.
The Stockings, why shou'd I expose,
Stain'd with the Marks of stinking Toes;
Or greasy Coifs and Pinners reeking,
Which Celia slept at least a Week in?

Sigh. Buddha in real life might be like that. Yes, a slob in the dressingroom!

But Swift's poem ends with wisdom and compassion, as if coming directly from a buddha:

When Celia in her Glory shows,
If Strephon would but stop his Nose;
(Who now so impiously blasphemes
Her Ointments, Daubs, and Paints and Creams,
Her Washes, Slops, and every Clout,
With which he makes so foul a Rout;)
He soon would learn to think like me,
And bless his ravisht Sight to see
Such Order from Confusion sprung,
Such gaudy Tulips rais'd from Dung.