"Red, white, and Buddhist"

[stilltrucking]

Can you be a Buddhist in America?

Last Saturday I spent the day helping the daughter of my friend, the late Harvey Mark Rogosin, go through his house to see what to keep and what to throw away. Mark was a Buddhist legend here in Woodstock, New York, a town sometimes dubbed "the buckle" of the Buddha Belt, because the surrounding regions hosts the highest concentration of Buddhist monasteries, temples, and meditation centers anywhere outside of Asia, a fact which has led one expert to predict that it will become a pilgrimage site for future Buddhists--the place they go to remember a time when Buddhism in America was still young.
Mark moved here 30 years ago, transforming himself from New York patent attorney to Buddhist holy man, and subsequently producing a vast array of what might best be described as American Buddhist folk art. There is not enough space here to catalogue the many treasures we found. A short list would include legions of stones, leaves, planks, shingles, cards, scrap paper, and virtually any other surface medium that could take the imprint of a Sharpie marker, all bearing the universal Buddhist blessing OM MANI PADME HUM ("Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus").

For nearly 30 years, Mark walked the streets of Woodstock handing out his "mani stones" to anyone who would receive them. The town loved him for it, and most shopkeepers here had at least one or more of his mantras displayed somewhere in their store. When he died I found two dozen or so around my house. Then, just yesterday, flipping a field stone in our garden I turned up yet another, like some seed that had lain dormant for many winters, only to come to colorful life again with the year's first spring rain.

I couldn't help thinking about Mark last night after I watched the two-hour PBS feature "The Buddha," directed by David Grubin. I found its treatment of the life of Shakyamuni, historical founder of the world's fourth largest religion, haphazard, impulsive, and at times visually disjointed. It seemed it couldn't decide what kind of film it wanted to be or what aspect of the Buddha's message it most wanted to convey. Likewise, with the exception of the Dalai Lama and Tibet activist/Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, the panel of experts seemed to have been assembled at random, without much thought given to recent scholarship or any sense of modern Buddhist culture.

But that wasn't what kept me up most of last night after watching it.

The Buddha's is a religion of self-inquiry--an impulse so strong and so universal in Buddhism that even the most vapid of Grubin's experts got it right every time. Consequently, when we don't like something, our first duty as Buddhists is to ask ourselves a simple question: Why?

The first round of answers is usually something like my forgoing objections to "The Buddha." The problem is usually somewhere "out there." In today's culture, most of us stop here. Finding fault with the other has become our national pastime. More than that, in a post-industrial culture given over to every imaginable form of media and news entertainment, it keeps many of us employed, as legions of critics, pundits, and culture-meisters offer verdicts on the moral, political, or aesthetic lapse of the day. Buddhism is good medicine for this national disease, simply because its underlying teaching is that there is always another "Why?"

Answer the question as to why we don't like a particular thing or person and--for the Buddhist at least--that answer leads directly to a further question: Why? Follow the trail of why's far enough and they will always lead us back to the same place: the self. The problem is never "out there."

Following the trail of why's after watching Grubin's film led me back, unexpectedly, to my friend Mark Rogosin--specifically, to an episode in his life that occurred a few years before I met him.

According to an August 1991 New York Times article about the incident, one day a "perfectly round" six-foot wide, two-and-a-half foot deep hole appeared in the small parking lot adjacent to Mark's house on Old Forge Road in Woodstock. Dug through impacted, rocky soil with what appeared to be a tablespoon, the hole was almost a miracle in itself. It was quickly deemed dangerous by the town, however, and Mark was arrested and charged with fourth-degree criminal mischief. He would doubtless have been let off without a fine or jail time had he been willing to explain why he dug the hole. Being a lawyer, of course, he knew this. But for reasons of his own he steadfastly refused to speak a word in his defense.

Some years later people were still wondering about the incident, and so a brief video documentary, "Holy Hole," was created to reconsider the event. In the video Mark offers no further word of explanation. In fact, he offers no word of any kind, except to inscribe the mantra on stones and slide them across the table at the public library where the "interview" took place. Years later the "Why" of Mark's hole remains an unanswered question. Perhaps, like a lot of things, it didn't have to have a reason. Like a lot of things, maybe the explanation we offer for it really tells us more about ourselves.

I found "The Buddha" problematic precisely because, as an American Buddhist, I still find Buddhism problematic--profoundly problematic. Even as I practice and teach it, I live in conflict with it. What do we do with a religious founder born to privilege who names his son Rahula (literally, "fetter"), abandons his wife and newborn child, starves himself within inches of his life, and thereafter preaches almost exclusively to a celibate order of men and (after holding out against them for as long as he could) women--women who are required to follow twice as many monastic rules as the men and are subsequently regarded as a threat to male monastic authority and, yes, male monastic celibacy? (Sound familiar?) Clearly, as the Buddha himself would have pointed out, the answer cannot be that we should accept the Buddha and the religion named after him at face value without exploring our honest feelings and doubts about them. But, in that case, we've got a lot of sorting out to do. And that takes time--lots of time.

The slightly smug, self-congratulatory demeanor of the Buddhist proponents featured in "The Buddha" left me wondering at first if American Buddhism had taken a wrong turn somewhere. As a spiritual culture, American Buddhism is nowhere even close to having assimilated those aspects of the Buddha's teachings that are worth carrying forward, or--for that matter--rejecting those which must be abandoned, and there are plenty. But then, having thought that, I found myself wondering if I didn't need a reality check as well.

My friend Mark wrote OM MANI PADME HUM on as many as 100,000 stones and scraps of paper over the 30 years he lived in Woodstock, and painted thousands of traditional images of the Buddha as well. In all the years I knew him, I never once heard him offer an explanation for these actions, nor did I ever see him try to offer anything like a teaching. He practiced his religion, and he blessed others at every opportunity. And that seems to have been all. If there is a way to get to that elusive future called American Buddhism from where we stand now, surely it lies along that path

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