Robert Wright's "Why Buddhism Is True": Book Review

For those skeptical of supernatural claims and theistic versions of Buddhism, Robert Wright continues the quest that his earlier books such as The Moral Animal and The Evolution of God began. These titles hint at Wright's terrain, where fact and speculation, the tangible and the experiential, blur. He explores in Why Buddhism Is True the worldview that in the time of the historical Buddha could not have been clearly expressed in pre-scientific, and very pre-Darwinian terms to human mindsets.

Fresh from teaching courses on Buddhism and science at Princeton and similar courses at the Union Theological Seminary, Wright blends a wide-ranging series of investigations summed up from neural and biological research. His thesis proposes that the truth-claims of the dharma were a first, and correctly directed, step towards our own understanding of natural selection and the drives it creates. Born with them, we can free ourselves from them. Buddhism predicted the remedy for our human condition.

For instance, what on the savannah might have kept us reproducing, in thrall to our communal band, and with sufficient resources to guard against hunger or competition now linger in us. They may be go under the names of lust, social fear of being shamed, avarice, gluttony and greed, but they convey the same "fetters" which Buddhist teaching encourages, and demands, we must overcome if we want to reach a more balanced and controlled mental and physical state, freed of the illusions of the senses.

Around this central argument, Wright spins a lot of tales. A Foreigner song stuck in his mind, an annoying sitter near him on a meditation retreat, an urge to become easily irritated. He's been on the Buddhist path a while, but he rejects the trappings which have grown up around the teaching. He opts for a secular version, acknowledging that it may well be diluted (as is mindfulness or yoga) as it turns to the West, but he analyzes, in a final addendum. the core concepts that his book's laid out about establishing the veracity of what the Buddha and adepts since have incorporated into the dharma.

The tone is casual despite the heaps of learning stirred in. Wright writes again for a popular audience. Such interpretations possess value, for those of us less able or less leisured to delve into what the labs or monasteries for that matter might be generating as scholarship. However, the weight of so much data, dispersed over many chapters, sometimes slows the pace. Despite his genial tone, parts of this felt repetitious, belaboring the obvious once stated. Yet I find this same reaction to some treatments of Buddhism. A core teaching, a set of instructions  can be summed up pithily, but like chess, for each pursuit the application approaches the infinite. This might convince, therefore, those already initiating some dharma practice for a while, While Wright introduces teaching, it's more its implementation.

That leads him near the conclusion to some elevated claims. He endorses Daniel Ingram's promise that meditation results can be attained with diligence rapidly, and not just by those with decades of training. Wright like many admits that his transports have not occurred often, and when one did, he shows how ephemeral it was. He counsels daily discipline, more to calm and to establish more within one's reactive mechanism (not a term he uses) a longer-range, considered, and composed response to the triggers which, as with road rage, we inherit from billions of years of evolution, becoming an organism determined to gain ground, acquire loot, store up calories, and dominate by trophy wives.

I expected the author to turn to a philosopher who also predicted ways in which we can comprehend our predicament, and who is seen in retrospect as sympathetic to Buddhism, Schopenhauer. In my e-galley, I did not find any mention of the World as Will and Representation that he conceived. It seems prescient here. There's discussion of contemporary thinkers, more from psychology than philosophy..

This book will create some debate, I predict, among the more traditional Buddhist practitioner; those open to his analytical, even detached attitude at times, and his production of a practical set of guidelines, may benefit from a presentation of the dharma seeking liberation not into a higher realm, but from the natural selection which tethers us to demands which prevent us from fully entering the state the Buddha modeled. Sure, as Wright concurs, sentience and cognition and evolution into our present status all have definite advantages. But as to drawbacks, he advises the dharma. Even if the science we now promote might in the future shift, the bedrock of the dharma, Wright avers, remains solid. Beholden as we'll be to our genetic inheritance, we can nurture by Buddhism our true nature.

 (Amazon US 8-8-17 + Edelweiss+; this review by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker appeared after I wrote mine. It's titled in the print copy "American Nirvana" and at the website as "What Meditation Can Do for Us and What it Can't")

"An appropriate response"

This was the answer a Zen master gave to one who asked him to define enlightenment. I attend a more-or-less monthly sitting with a few people. Over the years, we've gotten used to the routine. Our moderator gathers us, we practice what's loosely called "recollective awareness." It's based on using the Buddhist insights to look into what happens, when we meditate, whatever it is, and then report it.

While I am the shyer type, the fact I knew the moderator, trained in this, long before I knew he'd been in fact doing this on his quiet retreats he'd go away on and never talk about, at least with my wife and her workmates where at the time he joined them, convinced me I could trust him and then the setting.

Today, the five of us (there are up to seven of us total, but often one of us, me included, has to work) reflected, unavoidably on the news of the past few days. Last month, the anxiety some attendees exuded was palpable. While I reacted, it seems, with more equanimity and calm, along with surprise, than nearly all around me who'd invested their hopes in Her, the aftermath, of course, is one we're all feeling. So, the reminder of the parable of a poisoned arrow was the subject of the day's recollection.

The point (!) of this is simple. The Buddha urged us to act as if we were on fire, fleeing a burning house, to seek the way out of endless repetition, the same-old same-old, the illusion it's all permanent. With examination, one found nothing arose on its own, and all things depend on other things, and all things must pass. The clinging to these notions of stability, to a self, to a soul, creates pain or unease.

Related to this central teaching, those who became distracted by the causes of the effects of "dukkha" (like I get distracted) were foolish. Metaphysical analyses were fruitless. Pierced by a poisoned tip, one plucks it out. One does not speculate on the color of the arrow, the feathers of the shaft, or even the nature of the concoction threatening to flow into one's veins. Instead, one plucks out the arrow.

Our moderator related this familiar tale to the current news. Why do we wallow in self-pity? I might add, comparing last Tuesday to 9/11, or throwing rocks through windows? Are marches premature? (N.B. After I put this piece up, I found this in my FB feed: Buddhist teachers respond to T's win.)

The new president has 75 or so days before taking office. Perhaps reasoned discourse might be given a chance? If we are deeply divided, I remarked, we are also united by various forms of suffering. The pain felt by the electorate came out partially before and partially after Election Day. The "protests" feared by the blue states now loom large in headlines, whereas if the red states had lost, their "riots" would have been disdained and ridiculed as the tantrums of spoiled losers, just sour grapes squashed.

Political activism is necessary. Complacency all around has lured us, by our gadgets and distractions, away from social change. But channeling that in careful ways will result in gains that knee-jerk name-calling will not. Not sure how wearing a giant safety pin to assure those tearing out hair and gnashing teeth if that'll get across "you're safe with me" amidst the presumed unleashing of the Beast.

Meanwhile a FB pity party: the frantic posting of toxic social media memes: the status updates as all-black, the lamentations and jeremiads of apocalyptic doom. A Play-Doh and coloring book safe space for the bereft U. of Michigan Law School students. Giddy news snippets exaggerating the slightest slight someone receives as if Kristallnacht has returned, or if the Antichrist is knocking on a post-Halloween door. The frisson of leaving a horror movie, cuddling with sobbing pals against the orange bogeyman, is fun. But as Stephen Greenblatt told us a week ago about Richard III, Something inside of us enjoys every minute of his horrible ascent to power." Yet, I ask if that esteemed Shakespearean critic at Harvard might be trapped in his own echo-chamber, for his analogy to the election leaves out any other figures from any other plays. Surely She could be held as liable to the fatal flaw as Him? (I wrote all of this back on Nov. 13, 2016, but only found it in my archive now...)

A final note is to ask how much we invest in a human, fallible position as president. Why do we invest so much emotion, and billions of dollars in influencing our fellow citizens to vote as we do? Is it wise to place so many elevated expectations in He or She? Examining our own complicity, our internal delusions, might be recommended before pointing the finger and tossing the brick at those we mock as the Other. The fear of the ignorant (a contingent to which I was assigned by a trans-activist who'd surely not stereotype any other group outside the white working class from which I was raised, for better or worse) remains even within the liberal, educated, progressive crowd, it seems. One way to counter this relegation of millions to a despised status is to spread healing, and to listen to each other more, and condemn or preach to each other less. We all bear slings and arrows.

When I left the all-day session, the sun was setting over the distant Pacific, a sliver of it barely visible fifteen miles west. The clouds ran reddish pink in the blue sky, tinged with white. I took it as a sign.

Dependent Arising + the Dodgers

At my last sitting, our moderator raised a couple of insights I wanted to share. First, that the fundamental concept of dependent arising, that nothing happens in isolation, in Buddhism connects with the problem many have of taking ideas out of context. Then, extracting phrases, elevating persons, exaggerating points generates the distortions that can plague us when we loosen moorings. We drift from the safety net.

That is, meditation can ground us into a state of awareness, to explore the realm where our mental (and sometimes to me visual if less so than it "appears" most people who report their recollections) constructs solidify or emerge under a contemplative situation. This may seem airy, but becoming more cognizant of how we respond in our interior to forming awareness around an image, a thought, a thing can help us understand how the formative process works within to solidify the intangible, to reify the imaginary, and to harden the fluid. In turn, this reveals how we conceptualize and then may try to hold on to the ever-changing as if permanent. And we see, I'd add, how many huddle around their role model, their candidate, their champion, as if he or she can solve their problems and offer solace or success if only we believe enough in Her or Him to rally to their party, to vote, to hope. Change comes no matter.

As I've stated often, my disengagement with this status quo grows with age. But all around me, pain and unease manifest themselves. In those who fear the new power, in those who cheer the new power. But transferring our own actions and identities onto another clashes with our own capability to create change in ourselves and in those around us, practically rather than politically or ideologically. For those removals of "agency" (a buzzword now, but it works in philosophy...) to a figure we idolize or disdain distances ourselves from the true force of energy and enthusiasm, that we possess within us.

If a lesson in impermanence is needed, it's all around us. Administrations come and go, programs get implemented for better and worse, and campaign promises evaporate more than they find fulfillment. Too many in my estimation have rushed the past year and a half into worshiping one figure or another. They forget that, like rooting in my analogy for the red team or the blue team, that losses will happen and victories may diminish or increase, beyond the desperate intercessions made by the fans.

I used to watch the Dodgers much more (and not at all since they were blocked by cable in their hometown due to an endless dispute), but I realized that their own instability provided me with more worry than pleasure. What should have been entertainment became for me a struggle, as my emotions rose or fell with the hapless Blue Crew too often. So, while I remain loyal, I remain detached. That sort of emotional removal may not work as well for a society where a supposed leader can unleash sorrow or promote joy through his or her policies, but it may be necessary, for one's own sanity.

Part of me wants to engage, part of me to disengage. Within a system I dislike, my atavistic allegiance is to the underdog, the marginal, the misfit. That may include the befuddled home team, who never fail to fail again, since 1988''s World Series. I believe that more self-consideration will benefit me so when I choose a response, it's better informed and less knee-jerk or group-think. Meanwhile, CNN blares in the room above, the newspapers I get grow thinner and more expensive, and the reasons I have to put my trust in the powers-that-be dwindle as I try to look inwards, to take my own path, even if that means I blaze it and it lacks any definition or label, any post or marking.

Mindful of what?

"Please don't let your suffering make you an idiot." So the moderator of the small sitting group I join monthly advised us to regard this month's reactions to the election and its many discontents. He originally felt this in a harsher way, as in: "Why do you let your suffering make you an idiot?" But on reflection, always advisable, he revised his reaction. I think this is wise advice for us right now.

In an essay I failed to find online after reading the print version in the paper (increasingly the case) in last week's NYT Sunday Review, the writer counseled a balance between the two responses she saw to the results of the popular vote vs. the Electoral College. Some panicked. (I count my wife and it seems all of her friends among them.) Some took a deep breath. (Me, but it nearly nobody else at least on my FB feed, the echo chamber I reside. Work-talk on this topic, at my conservative-tilting institution where many vets of all backgrounds tend to tilt that way, perhaps counter our stereotype that the "non-white" immigrants and their offspring do lean in towards Her and her Beltway ilk. Vets or not, many whom I teach suspect Dems and their patronizing air.) 

Ruth Whippman, in a NYT entry today, suggests not to be in the moment, for once, as one panacea. Mindfulness gets preached as the cure-all by those able, as I see it, to take therapy at Esalen taught by fellow therapists. Most of us find our time and money constrained for such offerings. I confess my own bafflement after having received a catalogue of courses at that Big Sur bastion of the counterculture, intended for my tattooed and lithe neighbor, nearly half my age. It read like a parody.

Anyway, Whippman notes that this touted mindfulness "is a philosophy likely to be more rewarding for those whose lives contain more privileged moments than grinding, humiliating or exhausting ones. Those for whom a given moment is more likely to be 'sun-dappled yoga pose' than 'hour 11 manning the deep-fat fryer.' My first job, for $2.35 an hour in cash, was the latter, and I recall the smell of the batter and the burns from the grease when I bicycled home from Pioneer Chicken nightly.

There's a quick backlash in the New York Times type of media against any sympathy for "my" white working class, or as in the students I teach, the 30% of Latinos or Asians who nationally voted for Him. Yes, part of the left's rage directed at those who chose Him over Her may be fueled, as my wife and all of her friends insist, by bigotry. But it's driven too by fear of impermanence, to use the Buddhist critique. When a piddling contract gig gets counted by the White House among the touted total, it does not equate with the blue-collar employment formerly secured by my family's own experience, with benefits, decent if not great wages, and maybe even a pension. Instead, we're told to rent our spare rooms, drive for Uber, deliver for Smartcart, and for whatever medical care we need, to scrounge for scraps from an increasingly fraught Obamacare exchange with high premiums and low options. Immigration is urged as the remedy for an aging population, as if housing, traffic, hospitals and schools will all bounce back and respond to demographic and class-based pressures handsomely.

I differ as I did at the Thanksgiving table. My friends and family insisted that this is "not the time" for any challenge to Her Party, and that as before, "we" had to join Her and her colleagues in opposing Him. I think of Fidel Castro's savvy manipulation. When speaking, he pretended to affirm direct democracy. But he knew what he wanted to push over on the pueblo before he took the stand for a few hours of propaganda. He, however, acted as if he bowed to the will of the people, who by the end of his harangues, pressed on their Beloved Leader the very actions he himself had vowed to implement. Increasingly, my mistrust in leaders and parties and representatives grows. The system itself has been exposed as rotten, yet again, all around me, my friends and family press for only Her.

So, I join some who veer between retreating from the petulant fray and immersing myself in the fret. The distance afforded by reminders of the long haul, the danger of putting all of our trust or fury in those appointed not by us but by the deep state or shadow government, and the need for self-control rather than lashing out and spewing hurt is essential. Add to that a sober acceptance, as my friend from Derry and his Liverpool Irish Labour-socialist partner reminded us at Thanksgiving, of loss.

We Americans are not as used to defeat as our restive Irish/British counterparts. Inward criticism may not rest well with the many who seethe. But marches and demands even before the "leader" enters office appear to press prematurely the expectations of those on the defeated side. The 47% were mocked in the previous campaign, and now the 53% are. A few of us, additionally, who refused to vote for either "major candidate" (as always) are also indicted as irresponsible for our lack of pragmatism over principle. Unhappy as I am with our political capitulation and its concomitant economic cronyism, I do regard my right to "mind" my conscience, which as before is at peace, at least, amidst the frantic coverage of manufactured consent, group-think, and the quarrels it sparks.

Now, I know that meditation may feel a cop-out, when there's so much to do. When has there not been? Christ's rejoinder to Martha as she hurried about to serve him while he chatted with her sister Mary, sounds unfair to me. Few can afford the luxury of the contemplative pursuit as opposed to the active demands life commands. Yet, without time out, we wither, and we like the fig tree may die out.

"An appropriate response"

This was the answer a Zen master gave to one who asked him to define enlightenment. I attend a more-or-less monthly sitting with a few people. Over the years, we've gotten used to the routine. Our moderator gathers us, we practice what's loosely called "recollective awareness." It's based on using the Buddhist insights to look into what happens, when we meditate, whatever it is, and then report it.

While I am the shyer type, the fact I knew the moderator, trained in this, long before I knew he'd been in fact doing this on his quiet retreats he'd go away on and never talk about, at least with my wife and her workmates where at the time he joined them, convinced me I could trust him and then the setting.

Today, the five of us (there are up to seven of us total, but often one of us, me included, has to work) reflected, unavoidably on the news of the past few days. Last month, the anxiety some attendees exuded was palpable. While I reacted, it seems, with more equanimity and calm, along with surprise, than nearly all around me who'd invested their hopes in Her, the aftermath, of course, is one we're all feeling. So, the reminder of the parable of a poisoned arrow was the subject of the day's recollection.

The point (!) of this is simple. The Buddha urged us to act as if we were on fire, fleeing a burning house, to seek the way out of endless repetition, the same-old same-old, the illusion it's all permanent. With examination, one found nothing arose on its own, and all things depend on other things, and all things must pass. The clinging to these notions of stability, to a self, to a soul, creates pain or unease.

Related to this central teaching, those who became distracted by the causes of the effects of "dukkha" (like I get distracted) were foolish. Metaphysical analyses were fruitless. Pierced by a poisoned tip, one plucks it out. One does not speculate on the color of the arrow, the feathers of the shaft, or even the nature of the concoction threatening to flow into one's veins. Instead, one plucks out the arrow.

Our moderator related this familiar tale to the current news. Why do we wallow in self-pity? I might add, comparing last Tuesday to 9/11, or throwing rocks through windows? Are marches premature? (N.B. After I put this piece up, I found this in my FB feed: Buddhist teachers respond to T's win.)

The new president has 75 or so days before taking office. Perhaps reasoned discourse might be given a chance? If we are deeply divided, I remarked, we are also united by various forms of suffering. The pain felt by the electorate came out partially before and partially after Election Day. The "protests" feared by the blue states now loom large in headlines, whereas if the red states had lost, their "riots" would have been disdained and ridiculed as the tantrums of spoiled losers, just sour grapes squashed.

Political activism is necessary. Complacency all around has lured us, by our gadgets and distractions, away from social change. But channeling that in careful ways will result in gains that knee-jerk name-calling will not. Not sure how wearing a giant safety pin to assure those tearing out hair and gnashing teeth if that'll get across "you're safe with me" amidst the presumed unleashing of the Beast.

Meanwhile a FB pity party: the frantic posting of toxic social media memes: the status updates as all-black, the lamentations and jeremiads of apocalyptic doom. A Play-Doh and coloring book safe space for the bereft U. of Michigan Law School students. Giddy news snippets exaggerating the slightest slight someone receives as if Kristallnacht has returned, or if the Antichrist is knocking on a post-Halloween door. The frisson of leaving a horror movie, cuddling with sobbing pals against the orange bogeyman, is fun. But as Stephen Greenblatt told us a week ago about Richard III, Something inside of us enjoys every minute of his horrible ascent to power." Yet, I ask if that esteemed Shakespearean critic at Harvard might be trapped in his own echo-chamber, for his analogy to the election leaves out any other figures from any other plays. Surely She could be held as liable to the fatal flaw as Him?

A final note is to ask how much we invest in a human, fallible position as president. Why do we invest so much emotion, and billions of dollars in influencing our fellow citizens to vote as we do? Is it wise to place so many elevated expectations in He or She? Examining our own complicity, our internal delusions, might be recommended before pointing the finger and tossing the brick at those we mock as the Other. The fear of the ignorant (a contingent to which I was assigned by a trans-activist who'd surely not stereotype any other group outside the white working class from which I was raised, for better or worse) remains even within the liberal, educated, progressive crowd, it seems. One way to counter this relegation of millions to a despised status is to spread healing, and to listen to each other more, and condemn or preach to each other less. We all bear slings and arrows.

When I left the all-day session, the sun was setting over the distant Pacific, a sliver of it barely visible fifteen miles west. The clouds ran reddish pink in the blue sky, tinged with white. I took it as a sign.

Anam Thubten's "The Magic of Awareness": Audiobook Review

I reviewed Anam Thubten's companion collection of talks, also read by Frank Stella,  No Self, No Problem. This addressed those with a familiarity with Buddhism, but who (reading between the lines) seemed to have become frustrated with their lack of progress towards "perfection." Thubten directs practitioners away from this false hope.

These talks continue this path, grounded in meditation and in cultivating awareness. For convenience given the format on audiobook, I will copy and paste my Audible guided review

"Laying down our burden"

What made the experience of listening to The Magic of Awareness the most enjoyable?

Frank Stella's earnest, emphatic, but calm narration is well matched to Anam Thubten's insistent message that urges the listener to abandon the ego's defenses to find bliss within.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Not applicable. This is aimed at Buddhist meditators and practitioners. I reckon it's too advanced for those without some experience with the teachings and the path. It may encourage, like his other book "No Self, No Problem," those who have hit a dry spell.

What does Fred Stella bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Buddhist teachers convey their instruction by personal conferences and talks so the oral nature of this medium makes it well-suited. His steady voice deepens the ambiance.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No, as it is too much to take in. Even four hours at twenty minutes or so a chapter concentrates a lot to ponder. The oral presentation may reward revisiting and rewinding. My one improvement would have been an introduction, as the chapters feel more discrete and the unifying approach taken by Thubten needs more attention and effort to be grasped, especially given the audiobook. The words are often simple but the intentions are profound.

Any additional comments?

Thubten's theme is that the dharma tells us to "lay down our mental burden," the constructions of the mind that prevent it from seeing the "groundless ground" and the Tibetan concept of "luminous mind" that transcends by "prajna" our thoughts and concepts. He wants us to abandon our "spiritual library" accumulated of concepts learned but not experienced. This "prison of duality" prevents the ego from dying and ultimate truth emerging. "Oneness-emptiness" cannot be found by speculation but by direct encounter. (6-27-15 to Amazon US)

Anam Thubten's "No Self, No Problem": Book Review

Buddhist teachings are traditionally conveyed in the spoken word. "Getting rid of baby teeth" means that we need to get away from childish expectations of what the spiritual search is all about. Anam Thubten divests us of trappings and veils around the core.

I liked the glimpses of the author as he talked to a very affluent NoCal-Berkeley audience, probably, and tried to steer them away from what Chogyam Trumpa called "spiritual materialism," adding up "points towards perfection." Thubten advises inner direction, grounded in meditation and awareness.

What lingers are the sections when Anam Thubten talked about prayer, not as a petition to a divine entity, but a search for the transcendent truth of prajnaparamitra. This is not found by speculation but by a direct encounter with the ultimate within which we find our being. This firm caution from Thubten steers us from setting up goals to meet, or fulfillment to rush after over and over.

"Spirituality is Not a Teddy Bear." Anam Thubten challenges us to take on a spiritual discipline, not to escape into petitioning a god who denies or accepts our pleas. He reminds us how the quest for truth is full of ego traps, and how difficult it is to stay focused upon it. This book is best read (or heard) by those who have basic knowledge of Buddhism and have been practicing a while, but who might have hit a dry spell or wondered why more "fireworks" have not happened. Thubten cautions us against such hopes.

Frank Stella narrates this audiobook with emphasis and delicacy. He reminds me of Martin Sheen or Peter Coyote, as he seems in tune with the countercultural message. I do have an ego-block as I wonder how letting go aligns with the needs of the poor and the exploited, and how fixing the world is not a mere "illusion"--but social critique is absent from this individualistic, dogged approach. (To Audible + Amazon US 6-25-15; see my review of his other audiobook, The Magic of Awareness)

D. F. Bailey's "White Light Meditation": E-Book Review

I'm curious about meditative practices outside of a religious framework and ritual observance. I also wonder about those that, as D. F. Bailey's encourages, expect one to empty the mind. So, the author's invitation to review his short (e-book as a Kindle) study offered me a chance to learn more.

"White Light" bases its approach on thirty years of crafting by a Canadian writer and a counseling psychologist; this non-theistic, non-mystical orientation is designed to channel, as Chapter Two details, a "universal force of nature" with which to align the meditating mind. Chapter Three defines meditation, categorizes four types, and differentiates White Light Meditation's "special nature." Ten steps follow for Chapter Four's implementation. Chapter One introduces the study and Five wraps it up.

He begins with the analogy of iron filings seemingly "magical" as they combine and separate with an "aligning power" manifested on a paper, placed over a magnet, an experiment we learn in school. D. F. Bailey elaborates this comparison to the meditative process and its realigning power. He then continues to fit White Light Meditation into four definitions used by psychologists.

Breathing, walking, mindfulness, and mantra versions intersect with White Light where they all attempt to lift one out of awareness so as to become aware of awareness. This is not double-talk. This "illuminated consciousness" shifts one away from the primary type, the "monkey-mind" scattered by constant chatter of our normal experience. He does not apply Buddhist metaphors explicitly here, but those familiar with the "monkey" and the "raft" will recognize a few concepts.

The heart of this short account, 40% in, comes in ten steps, for twenty-thirty minutes daily. He recommends a week to prepare, including the avoidance of intoxicants, to enhance clarity. He adds advice for posture, setting, and time of day. Then, he explains the more "passive" aspects as the "illuminated consciousness" subtly shifts into gear.

This prepares for "stream entry" and unsurprisingly a focus on light in one's field of vision. He details types, and connects this with a mantra's release as "the inflection point into deep relaxation." He then guides you along the situations that may arise in meditation.

He segues into benefits of better fitness, more control over one's struggles, and the happiness which may emanate from the simple advice he organizes into ten steps. I agree that it's better to incorporate anxieties into a meditation to understand them specifically, rather than try to evade or glide past them as non-specific and nagging. He concludes, given his professional training, with a consideration of scientific explanations for the White Light, chakras, the Golden Mean, and brain chemistry.

The freedom from hype, theological or mystical speculation, and New Age or culture-specific applications makes this a primer anyone can use. Regardless of one's belief system, this allows meditation to become integrated into one's routine neatly. It's recommended, notably to a reader who may be less eager or more skeptical of more religious or ritualized types of meditation. (Amazon US 3-10-13)

Ben Howard's "The Backward Look": Book Review

For a couple of years, I'd drive on my way to work past a yellow sign hanging from a concrete slab building facing the freeway: "First Time Ever, Last Time Ever." I suppose it referred to some never-ending sale, but I liked to think of it in terms of a daily reminder of impermanence. (Recently, of course, it disappeared.) In poet-critic Ben Howard's successor to his first collection of essays "Entering Zen," (2011; see my reviews on Amazon US and this blog), he advances along the path of awareness of this fundamental Zen truth, addressing in these fifty entries from his columns for "One Time, One Meeting" that titular acknowledgment, of the fleeting encounters we too enter into.

Out of these, Howard creates short essays, grounded in everyday life. The first five exemplify their range. A poem by Billy Collins about shoveling snow with the Buddha, a lament by a Washington Redskins player about injuries, a 1948 Japanese novel about Burma, a slip on the ice tied into the difference between mishap and mistake, and the rest-stroke, free-stroke on guitar (Howard also plays): these demonstrate the characteristic concerns which he channels into his practice for us to see.

I use that verb for we witness Howard in modest, reflective manner, as a presence who steps up and then sidles away, allowing us to glimpse the meaning as he does, but also to sense the mystery. The title of this book comes from a Dogen quote: "Take the backward step and turn the light inward." By doing "just this," that Zen master promises our "original face" will appear; this also reminds me of one of the last remarks attributed to the Buddha urging his followers to "be a lamp unto yourselves." Howard interprets Dogen's stance as a shift away from "ego-centered thinking" to "other-centered awareness." This reorientation directs the practitioner to not a blissed-out state of detachment, but a sense of the balance between conditions of heightened sensitivity and informed action. Such an even-handed approach, as in meditation and thinking, speaking and doing, shows Howard's practice.

He's also practiced at writing, and I recommend his collected essays on Irish literature, "The Pressed Melodeon" as well. He keeps to a steady format, less than ten paragraphs usually. He offers wise tips about writing as a craft, and he applies them in unassuming but diligent fashion. As he cites Hemingway's advice, he prefers brevity and being "positive" in the sense of concentrating the body and the mind upon the moment, whether pleasant or not, to find it "empty of a separate self" in Zen.

Meanwhile, other poets enrich these pages. Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Swift, Dennis O'Driscoll (a less heralded talent worth your seeking out), Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanaugh from Ireland enter, but so do Basho, Philip Larkin, and even Bob Marley. From such sages, Howard accumulates their reflections on how to ease up, and to let go. One gain here I sense, teaching myself in an ever-increasing course load with higher enrollments but shorter turnaround times online for grading, emerges from Howard's slower pace. He advises us to limit our consumption of information, to let some comments stand as superfluous rather than as imperative. Never advocating ignorance, he instead encourages us to contemplate the wisdom of "not-knowing." From this humility, a term I reckon we hear much less nowadays, Zen cuts down pride and arrogance.

One of my favorite concepts is dependent origination, and Howard brings this lofty teaching down to his dinner table. There, he points to various loaves of bread from local bakeries, to illustrate this basic Buddhist insistence that "this ceases to be, because that ceases to be." Reading this when I'd received earlier that day bad news, I took heart in the repetition of this most fundamental of life's truths here.

As these essays progress, their tone sustains a firmly held if gently revealed insistence on the necessity of stepping back from our routine. Carrots, Yiddishisms, construction noise: all generate insights into the "imperfect life we are now living." Enhanced by Howard's teaching, his Iowa youth, his Irish stays, whatever he's read, seen, and discussed, his experiences seep into these essays. At his practice group on Sunday's summer evenings, impermanence becomes understood "not as a concept or a Zen tenet but as an experiential fact, as palpably real as the darkness gathering around us." He regards such a moment as welcome and as inevitable as any other in his encounters, shared with us. (Amazon US 4-22-14)

Joanne Miller's "Buddhist Meditation and the Internet": Book Review

If you enter Second Life with an avatar for meditation in its Buddhist hall, are you meditating at home, too? Can you gain the authenticity of millennia of dharma transmission in Zen if you join Amazenji's online zendo? How can anyone charged with teaching meditation or verifying its success for a student figure this out if separated in time and space from the traditional face-to-face reliance?

Such questions occurred to Joanne Miller, a sociologist (I suspect she's Australian) and a practitioner. Her research, integrated smoothly (footnotes speckle the plain-spoken text, blessedly free of academic jargon), confirms her suspicion. However, she then takes us into an examination, graded from casual to more intense sites, of how the Net has evolved, or not evolved, to handle the demands some expect cyberspace to solve regarding online Buddhist community and the formation of what duplicates or expands what happens in more intimate settings of a zendo or meditation group. The book does tend to focus on Zen--which aligns with Dr. Miller's orientation, it seems--and I wondered how Tibetan or vipassana approaches might compare or especially contrast. That aside, this book succeeds in demonstrating the difficulty of transferring a physical experience.

Unlike other religions, the text or the ritual is not the stress for dharma; it's the embodied presence of the meditator and actor. Understandably, the former category gains more attention than the latter. However, Dr. Miller correctly notes how Western Buddhism pushes meditation as the be-all of Buddhism in some insistent corners, to the detriment of ethical activity, study, and application of what is inculcated on the cushion.

The "main performative action" of sitting, she relates, cannot be reproduced technologically. What a screen may generate as a visualization is not from within the mind, and similarly, what is presented via mediation cannot substitute for what may be produced and shared in intangible but present ways between those in a real-time sit or dokusan. Also, the authority of those in a dokusan cannot be backed up with an online teacher, and many such, she reckons, deny the need for such approval before setting themselves up online or in the world as instructors.

Lots of points raise reflection. Doubt can grow when one's precepts are exposed online, she tells us as an aside. Individualization accelerated by the curious seeker online may increase confusion. One is networked, true, but also adrift and dependent on guides who may not be able to provide the direction of personal ones in one's own life, one-on-one in person. This menju, this one-to-one interaction, Dr. Miller repeats, cannot suffice online. Words, dependent for our transmitting what is going on online (this may change if we can plug in more directly one day...), are also insufficient to give each other the dharma-value that menju does.

Yet, out of this same experimental situation, Buddhism may arguably evolve and test itself in an entirely new venue. Gregory Grieve is quoted as suggesting "a real and authentic 'virtual embodiment' can equate with offline embodiment." He defines this as "a sustained, immersed bodily performance in a virtual space constrained by physical norms." We'll see!

Erika Borsos has preceded me [on Amazon US where this appeared 10-23-12--I too was provided with a review copy] with a fine summation of Dr. Miller's argument. I added to her precis my own reflections. I recommend this study. In my own college course in Comparative Religions, and Technology, Culture and Society, I anticipate passing along insights gleaned within this valuable work. May research and progress continue in this field, as scholars and practitioners both will learn from Dr. Miller's survey-to-date of the past decade or so.

David Chadwick's "Thank You and OK!": Book Review

After 22 years studying with Shunryu Suzuki-- whom he'd later write very fluently about in "Crooked Cucumber" (see my July 2009 review)--Texan-turned-San Franciscan Chadwick decamps for Japan in 1988. Interspersing an account of his second marriage, to Elin, and the birth of their son there with an immediately prior stint as a practitioner at the tiny temple he calls here (names are disguised) Hogo-ji with another teacher he knew back in the U.S, the elderly Katagiri, the results aren't truly what the subtitle reckons as "an American Zen failure" there. The point that he's already spent decades sitting and that he's ordained speaks for itself. The back-and-forth twinned threads can be unsettling as one constantly veers from a monastic situation to everyday encounters in the bustling place he calls Maruyama. 

Perhaps these shifts replicate the familiar tale of a foreigner struggling to find a place in Japan. A lovely moment comes as, comforting a Filipina barmaid, she asks him as a "priest" for a blessing. She takes his hands and puts them on top of her hair. "I felt the hands of a woman who has pulled men down on her many times." (20) Twice, black butterflies will hover together to express beauty. The fearsome incursions of giant wasps and enormous centipedes Chadwick summons up well, as well as more mundane encounters. The title itself comes from a ubiquitous box of matches. As he tells his fellow monk Norman: "'Thank you' is the gratitude, the gateway to religious joy, and 'OK,' which comes from 'all correct,' represents the perfection of wisdom. This is our mantra." Of course, Norman responds that David's infected with, using his friend's favored phrase, "brain weevils." (311)

His added Zen however wobbly enables him to be more patient than many would coming to the Far East from the Far West. There's an off-kilter sense often present here. A funny anecdote about the ridiculously pedantic forms required for his driver's license, the motions assumed one has to go through even if faking it, make for a great story about a rigid system that (as when he gets his visa extended) can still be bent. Late in this series of rambling vignettes, he reflects that Katagiri was suspected on coming back to his native land from his work in America, and that Japan tries to resist outside influences. "It's pretty obvious that the extent to which foreigners suffer here is the extent to which they try to belong." (386)

The push against innovation pulls against the subtly more gentle, more humane attempts of the few monks to lighten the weight of discipline and hierarchy that impose their presence on those at Hogo-ji.  Lightly, he critiques the way (this is delineated well in the "Crooked Cucumber") that for Japanese, Zen means the stick, the pain of sitting, and the hardship endured. As for "helping anyone or offering anything accessible to the average person in terms of daily practice," he wonders what the Buddha would have thought. He doesn't delve deep into Buddhism itself, but he suggests in zazen that one's "just finding out a hint of what we are beyond our little boxes of unfolding thought." (369) 

Chadwick does not come down too hard on Japanese Zen, but as the book progresses, you sense the need for American versions to adjust to their own culture. There's a telling scene after Katagiri's ashes are returned to his native terrain: the village has lost its young to the cities and the allure of the Western-imported ways; meanwhile, Americans clad in monastic garb, half of them women, attend the funeral in the dying rural village. 

The book is marketed as humorous, and it's in a light tone that helps readability. Yet, while for me it went on far too long, it's worthwhile to a patient reader for the subtler cultural differences. These need not be sent up always as folly. Surely Chadwick with his own relative fluency in the language he diligently studies accounts for more insight than many visitors possess. (5-2-13 Amazon US)

Bill Porter's "Zen Baggage: A Pilgrimage to China": Book Review

A skilled translator under the name Red Pine, as Bill Porter, he wanders ten weeks in early 2006, with a bottle of port, Snickers fun bars, tea, and pumpkin cookies. He travels north to south, pursued by the yellow dust, into the world of "red dust," the real realm as opposed to that Zen monks pursue. That realm strives to plunge the practitioner into language so as "to make us let go of language." (16)

He makes a great analogy when he visits a Choukoutian site for "Peking Man." "Early humans lived in a sea of sound. It took a long time before language and music pulled us out of that ocean and we had to start using religion to find our way back to its shores." (26) There's not a lot of fancy prose here, but Porter's a patient guide.

He stresses Zen as "just a way of living" (182): the simple admonition reverberates in the monasteries trying to expand after being crushed by Mao and the Cultural Revolution. The monks stopped between 1960-1980; today, the monasteries fill, but you don't get much sense of how monks suffered or why Zen appeals to younger cadres today. People don't appear to open up much to Porter, or he chooses not to probe--it may be caution on both sides in what in a rare aside he notes is still a "brutalizing" regime.

Porter argues for a Zen model based in communal living and self-sufficient farming. Few monasteries can live like this now, but some try to return to this ideal. As for Zen's origins in China, he differs with the academic interpretation of Chinese Zen as a fusion of indigenous Daoism and Indian Buddhism, favoring Zen's persistence as an "invisible tradition" not recorded in orally-based India but which by private transmission emerged into China, "affecting everything from art to gardening." (308)

Porter writes genially. He hints at his past and these brief interludes prove intriguing. Avoiding being sent to Vietnam by going AWOL; studying Intensive Chinese under a "Dragon Lady" at Columbia; working as a Taiwan-based journalist; stumbling into a 1989 PRC pro-democracy rally; meeting a hobo with a tale to tell: Porter conveys these few paragraphs of each scenario with verve. Yet by comparison to his previous book "Road to Heaven," about Chinese hermits, "Zen" revealed more about Porter's colorful life.

As for his main tale, not much happens. Lots of names and dates pass, and while Porter meticulously transfers his journal notes (what he paid is related diligently for every taxi ride or dessert treat) and his dutiful itinerary, this content will slow the pace to that of Porter's own. His bad back gets massaged and he welcomes sweets. He records his every move south, and you do find yourself witnessing what he does, even if it's not that exciting. Which may be the quiet lesson: how to make your life useful, if not flashy. This version of a pilgrimage may offer verisimilitude, but you don't come away with as much of a vivid sense of what it's like to meditate as a Zen adept or dramatic insights into monastic life today; you do feel you are with Porter each step of his long, patient, subtle way, on the other hand. (Amazon US 6-7-13)

Bill Porter's "Road to Heaven": Book Review

Porter, who translates Chinese poetry under the name of Red Pine, travels into the Chungnan range dividing the wheat from the rice, the north from the south. His visit is either well or badly timed, the late spring of 1989. He gets caught up in a pro-democracy demonstration, but departs for the hills in search of hermits before the Tiananmen Square crackdown in early June. He and his photographer partner decide to return that August. Perhaps the chill in the political air permeated those he meets, for there's less told here that delves into the fate of hermits under Mao and the PRC.

In a sort-of sequel to this account, "Zen Baggage" (reviewed 6/2013), Bill Porter relates this demonstration to a CIA operative, who wryly notes that the Agency noted Porter's spontaneous involvement. Like "Zen," "Road to Heaven" carries a wandering sensibility. Porter reveals less than in the other book about himself (not that he tells much) but lots about the dates, names, and history of the contexts for the shrines, temples, and hermitages he visits. While accessible to the non-specialist reader such as me, this material can slow the pace. Porter favors lots of detail and the result feels like a guidebook's commentary rather than a vividly conveyed, personal, rendering of sights.

However, he intersperses conversations, often terse, with often no-nonsense Taoist (and a few Buddhist, or hybrid) monks and nuns who've managed despite persecution during the Cultural Revolution to survive, on and off for some, steadily for a few, in the remote regions traditionally sought by those dropping out from the pressures of society to pursue the precepts of the Dao and the simple but demanding solitude that for them leads to wisdom, and if Taoists, to try to attain entry into immortality.

Like the Dao, this concept's pretty fuzzy even when hermits try to articulate this famously allusive ideal. I like Lao-Tzu's notebook remark, after he passed royal graves: "we can see the loss of desire/the cost of what we keep" (40). An abbot sums up the pursuit of Pure Land Buddhism or Zen as basically two paths to one goal. "Practice is like candy. People like different kinds. But it's just candy. The Dharma is empty." (96)

Not much happens during the travels Porter shares. He's off on less beaten paths, he does not have many extraordinary encounters to enliven these pages. Grounded more in historical narration and brief, sometimes stolid, interviews, there's far less of the itemized, step-by-step, price-by-price pace of his later travelogue from 2006 when he sought out Zen practitioners. But there's a similar reticence among those he talks to to reveal what life was like during their privations under Communism or during WWII. The recovery of the Zen monasteries after decades of persecution ties into the regime's wish to cash in on tourism. For Daoists, the same profit motive via the Party's control as a trade-off for monastic survival, as on fabled Huashan, appears to threaten the hard-kept and hard-won isolation that few monks or nuns can find today.

As Porter concludes after a visit to the splendid vistas of Taipaishan: "Those who follow the Tao cannot divorce themselves from others, yet to find the Tao they must retire from society, at least temporarily, to practice self-cultivation and concentration of mind." (199) Porter fittingly tries to capture what he knows he cannot, the message of the Tao that can be found by practice, and meditation, not by study or books. But, a few hermits try to explain; so must Porter. This little book may not succeed more than any other in that attempt, but it avoids the wry aphorisms or exotic packaging that commonly makes this challenging self-scrutiny too tidy for us. (6-16-13 Amazon US)

Jane Dobisz' "The Wisdom of Solitude": Book Review

As I get older and my house gets more cluttered, I wonder what paring my life down to a bare minimum might look like. How large a dwelling, how many possessions, how much baggage? Jane Dobisz examines in short chapters her own approach towards radical simplicity. She stays a hundred days at a former health resort, a remote place in New England's woods known as Temenos, and as a Zen practitioner, she reports on her winter experience in a 150-square foot cabin with no running water, heated by a stove and whatever wood she can chop and stack.

Dividing her stay into forty vignettes, each prefaced by a Zen poem or saying, and arranged loosely by tens under headings of  "Arrival," "Rolling Up Sleeves," "Hard Training," and "Spring Comes," the results come as expected. My practical mind kept wondering how she could afford this stay away from whatever her work is, what her background was that allowed her this luxury amid privation, and as the book's dedicated to a daughter and Dobisz is not that old--how her family fared without her.

She chooses not to tell. While introducing her list of what she carried in and what her demanding schedule of mainly sitting and walking from 3:15 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. meant in terms of mental stability as well as the fitter and tougher physical benefits she acclaims, her 2004 account examines less of her surroundings or amenities and orients itself more towards spirituality. Unsurprisingly, the benefits, even if she accepts that "there is no safety net" in more ways than one, outweigh the burdens.

I preferred her reactions to the environment even if these remained often only asides. For instance, she notes her visual spectrum altered as the neons and garish tones seen on computers, in ads, and stores fade into the few shades of a sparer, snowy landscape. She also fits a poignant chapter on how the "Sipping green tea, I stop the war" teaching she brings excitedly to a Korean teacher is met--in the second clause-- with dismissal as "b.s." Dobisz ties this into her reminiscence of a section titled "Ten Years Dumb," about her father's death of natural causes in Saigon when she was six, eloquently.

Yet, many other chapters prefer a more enigmatic or suspended tone. This attitude's typical of a Zen student or teacher writing a book of teachings or lessons. It may not satisfy fully those without this training, but I reckon this title will appeal to precisely those who share Dobisz's outlook and standing. (Amazon US 3-24-13)

Lawrence Shainberg's "Ambivalent Zen": Book Review

This memoir spans forty years of a smart man's attempt to shake off an authority figure. That figure may be his father, Alan Watts, Krishnamurti, a series of Japanese Zen masters, a psychoanalyst, a martial arts instructor, an aeronautical engineer turned real estate investor determined to remake monasticism in the leafy New York suburbs, his own addiction to zazen, or his self, struggling against its own annihilation as meditation demands Shainberg examine himself. The question remains, as a fellow practitioner who winds up under psychiatric care puts it, whether one "trapped within his own thoughts" can free himself from the discipline that promises such reflection. It reveals a mirror facing another mirror, and no image in between but emptiness.

Previous {Amazon} reviews focused on the author and the general topic, but Shainberg's structure for his chapters and his phrasing of the dharma both merit attention. The chapters divide along 1) his earlier years, 2) his relationship, admiring and resentful in turn with a more recent Zen teacher full of "crazy wisdom" and fractured, pithy Japanese-English pronouncements, 3) and past teachers, his former wife, fellow seekers, and figures with whom Shainberg from the 1950s onward tries to tackle the challenges of self-awareness bent on understanding the ego in therapy or undermining it in Zen.

This conflict is more tangential than central, but as Shainberg alludes to early in the book (29), D.T. Suzuki's version of Zen promoted for psychiatrists in postwar America and their patients a guru-student relationship ironically built on stronger rather than suspect examinations of the ego. This exacerbated the power of a teacher over a novice, whether on the cushion or on the couch. The manner by which he relates his life's ambition to know himself better by attacking the notion of a self may fit his book's complicated structure, which does not follow an easy-to-follow chronology but which leaps ahead and doubles back.

Shainberg breaks up his version of the dharma too, so it comes bit by bit, as he tells his tale in the triple form I've noted. The Buddha's Middle Way of moderation offers a problem for the ego. It demands its own dissolution. (36) The Way "attacks" our "need within the rational mind to make the obvious inaccessible and mysterious." We carry our own solution, but "the target towards which he directs their consciousness is the one which, above all others, consciousness abhors." (37)

In his late teens, a child with a well-connected father whose own existential search compels his own life of inquiry, the two meet Alan Watts over vodka in a Chinese restaurant. Watts quotes a Zen master's analogy that "clinging to yourself is like having a thorn in the skin and that Buddhism is a second thorn to get rid of the first." When one thorn takes out the other, both can be discarded. Watts warns about grasping even Buddha's teachings as a sure-fire remedy: "The medicine is another disease!" (48) Yet, Shainberg as with his father and more and more of his peers will search for cures.

The First Noble Truth, for Shainberg, rejects future-oriented thinking which turns the wheel of hope, "of birth and death." Caught in the web of the self, "there is nothing more certain to make you feel worse than the dream of feeling better," (54) So, is freedom found within self-annihilation?

Maybe, he wonders after decades of pursuing therapy and Zen, "Zen is nothing more than a means by which self-consciousness is exacerbated until finally unbearable, it obliterates itself." (156) Little wonder at one point he retreats to his brother's isolated cabin, where for months he meditates longer and longer, on a scanty diet, driving himself by reading Samuel Beckett's prose trilogy and later asking that author about his affinities, supposed by more than one critic, with Zen. There aren't any
["Exorcising Beckett" in The Paris Review 104 (1987) reproduces and expands material in this book] but Shainberg lets us see why so many like himself imagine this connection.

Irony sustains Shainberg. Hosting a visiting master from Japan on the roof of Shainberg's apartment, the master tries to bite the moon and wants Shainberg to follow suit. "Why is my mind in two pieces while his is so clearly in one?" (170) Self-conscious, wishing he could abandon himself to the dissolution of satellite object and human subject, he reflects that he mentally observes the scene, taking notes for the book on Zen he's never writing. Until, of course, he does for us. 

He learns it's easier to write about Zen than to practice it, but he tries both and finds his breakthrough. His profile on Bernie Glassman, engineer-turned-Zen convert full of schemes revealing "management by meandering" brings him into the chosen circle near power--how an American adaptation of coed and non-celibate monasticism and utopian communal ideals pursued through endless committees, ecumenical reading lists, delegation of tasks, and frenetic fundraising transpires in Greystone, a mansion in upscale New York suburbia. This proves the most engaging part of this 1995 memoir. However, Glassman's scattered energy and grand visions remain ambiguous in the telling of his trusted advisor, apprentice monk, and resident author Shainberg. 

For, not only at Greystone, this transformational campaign feels hermetic. Its outreach to soup kitchens gets one aside. The impact of those following Zen beyond the zendo for the betterment of those not in the know remains blurred. This choice appears intentional, but it hovers: what does Shainberg do all day? Inherited wealth presumably affords him as he notes in an aside the leisure and income to take off with others in similar circumstances not burdened by children, families, or limited vacation time for a week's retreat, for example, in a manner those outside the professional classes find difficult. His occupation seems to be trying to write a novel, and moving about in search of a master he can believe in as he immerses himself in a series of personal commitments to get in shape and repeated attempts to join communal regimens. This quest, going as far as Jerusalem, becomes his life's insistent pursuit. Given his own marital failure even as he and his wife devoted themselves to Zen and physical betterment, one ponders Shainberg's terse admission that the best "catalysts for practice" come from the lonely and despairing, often from the "recently divorced." (244) 

Perhaps this reticence despite so much disclosure for Shainberg fits his intent. He offers an honest and more in-depth account of Zen's elusive message and those who appear to accept it more easily than he often does. His periods of exertion may stimulate an eagerness for more discipline, or they can plunge him into more doubt. Neither period appears to last for long--a moral in itself, although it may not please the unwary reader seeking an "inspirational" account full of platitudes or affirmations.

In diligently attempting to demonstrate the struggle of the mind (and the put-upon body, as considerable pain comes to many from sittings, not to mention the dubious ministrations to his eye from his martial arts teacher) which envelops the Zen practitioner, he shows the results on the ego. It's a memoir that attempts to examine what may be inexplicable in words. For, up until nearly this book's end, Shainberg squares off against himself--as that self reflects the teachings of non-self. (Amazon US 6-13-13)

Jason Siff's "Seeking Nibbana in Sri Lanka": Book Review

This California meditation teacher draws upon his experiences as a monk abroad as inspiration for this 2008 novel of ideas and insights pursued by Buddhist seekers. These recollected concepts, developed further if in factual format as Unlearning Meditation, circle around the difficulty of pinning down the elusive "nibbana" (nirvana in Pali spelling via Theravadin tradition of Southeast Asia). Its practitioners puzzle out if the ineffable but presumably unconditioned realm of transcendence may be if not grasped then, by a meditator, glimpsed.

Jason Siff draws you in as monks, or "bhikkhus," convene at a forest hermitage in Sri Lanka. Its long civil war recedes into the distance, as Aggachitta's renown as a meditation instructor attracts Sumana, a San Diegan come to find himself as a monk near a far different, less balmy coast. There, he finds Rahula, a "temple boy" appointed to feed the monks and care for the simple hermitage; myriad rules prohibit its monks, for instance, from even dishing out food to their confreres. This rule-bound monasticism, as we see it through newcomer Sumana, gains neither romanticized nor cynical depiction in Siff's narrative. He gives an indirect first person, largely unadorned editorial perspective, allowing each main character time to reflect and filter what transpires (much of it over only a few frenetic days, it seems) as the group grows despite itself.

Sumana rushes into his next stage: "He is certain that he wants to make an end to this round of rebirths right now, before he turns thirty, and then he can face anything in life with calm equanimity," with an unshakeable peace of mind. (4)  The monk's way of life certainly has benefits. The layfolk wait until the monks have finished praying, as the merits then accumulated for these donors of food will increase. Such calculation, with enumeration of attainments doled out by masters to students, and steps up towards heightened ranks of enlightenment, demonstrates what Theravada has become.

Aggachitta wonders, sparked by Sumana's request to learn meditation and the teacher's simple if bold response to "just sit" and then report on whatever happens, threatens to upend the system. Rather than adding up what a meditator appears to have reached on a five faculties, five-point scale, Aggachitta counters that this venerable accounting may be "nothing more than an intellectual model made up by some brilliant bhikkhu ages ago as a way to measure and assess meditative experiences without resorting to theories of divine intervention, psychic powers, or mystical revelations." (70) Although the characters here report sometimes their own lively visions and vivid sensations, they don't appear to receive them as if from above, and Siff subtly integrates his own recollective awareness process which he has developed to demonstrate the relevance of realizing the impetus for such "revelations."

This long-solo adept starts to feel crowded. The arrival of mercurial, unstable fellow "white-skinned" bhikkhu Palaparuchi, Sumana and then Rahula and his erstwhile suitor Devi fills the hermitage, along with Aggachitta's colleague Maggaphala, who tends not to be the intellectual Aggachitta, a Ph.D. before he donned his robes, strives to be, after decades in the forest pursuing a less worldly vocation. Siff introduces each of these antagonists or protagonists and we see, for instance, in the careful details afforded to the act of bathing (a repeated motif), Maggaphala's incorporation of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet, and Rahula and Devi's attempts to sort out their relationship relevant scenes from a surprisingly varied array of contexts which play off deeper concerns of the characters.

While these could provide another review's worth of content, for a short entry, I will stick to Aggachitta's quest. He leaves for a town monastery to work out, in some snatches of quiet, what troubles him about what he has taught Sumana and discussed with Maggaphala. This novel will be challenging for a reader lacking familiarity with Buddhist philosophy, but I suspect those opening these 360 pages will know the basic material already. Aggachitta grapples with detaching from a view that conventionally sees the twelve-link chain of causation leading from delusions to ignorance to liberation from constraints as a forward momentum; he proposes that delusions (in the plural) and ignorance interplay. This takes close attention, but he develops a theory that dependent arising can be observed in one's life "without taking up either the belief in rebirth or in an imperceptible rapidly changing reality" that leads to consciousness envisioned as a white thin flat panel of infinity, lacking  any support from above, no strings attached, suspended in space, "emanating from itself." (180)

Quite a challenge to convey in an accessible work of fiction. Nibbana then might be hinted at as not constructed but wordless, for how if the mind's truly empty can nibbana be built up in one's own suppositions as if present? (184) Aggachitta tries to meditate on this conundrum, to see if his idea of emptiness might match that attributed to the Buddha. "He does not know what to call it. Words can't survive here, and meanings seem to be as empty as their evanescent shells." (196) Ultimately, before he falls asleep, Aggachitta feels that he again lives and knows nibbana without any desire or derivation of it. (Maybe as elusive as trying, for Shakespeare's lovers, to truly speak of love.)

The "gap" concept of "nirodha" may help, what is glimpsed between links in the chain as they emerge and then fade, but Aggachitta figures this better conceived as a "clear space of knowing the act of knowing." (252) This is not sophistry. It's a fleeting hold on what may be permanent. "Nibbana is the path to its attainment." (263) Although unelaborated by Siff's characters (who must reflect their own cultural backgrounds and denominational affinities, after all), I've come across this phrasing before, but probably from Zen rather than in the Vipassana tradition by which they were trained and taught.

Meanwhile, it's not all speculation. We see how, in a couple of apposite chapters, various meditators undergoing their own reporting of what they ponder, and this helps show the process Siff favors in action, within the student and the master in the aftermath of recollection and recital of what's happened. This dramatizes and humanizes the material in his follow-up book which offers a non-fictional analysis of the same procedure. For, Siff keeps the story moving well, and he packs a lot of character development in a short span. Sumana finds his own interest in fellow former San Diegan Gotami, a blonde (or is it reddish-brown as a few pages apart in his own imagined or unreliably fevered recollection?) if now shaven young nun looking for her own teacher, and finding the same in Aggachitta. Palaparuchi and Maggaphala square off as age-old archetypes appear to return. Rahula and Devi must battle with their own families and their own fulfillment, and we also see how men and women in this traditional society encounter different opportunities, given long-held proprieties.

Aggachitta has the last word. A penultimate chapter wraps it up in a sylvan ending that Shakespeare himself might have liked, but the restless drive of the meditation teacher keeps the plot pushing on, even as the other characters relax and enjoy their hard-won peace. Still, I understand the riposte of Suriya, Aggachitta's brother and Rahula's father, who wonders as we may in the East or the West if his son is there only to learn another lesson: "How to get everything you need given to you?" (272)

I also append the warning of Maggaphala to Sumana and Gotami, all perhaps familiar with such gurus: "Ask those who write the books on meditation and teach to crowds, who have big centers and wealthy organizations, who do missionary work under the guise of giving people the true teaching of the Buddha, and who make a mockery of the noble path by granting attainments to practically every student who comes their way." (219) I waited for more self-criticism, or awareness such as this. A hermitage, relying on the goodness of donors, a place where men seem not to be able to treat women with full equality, and a place that prevents monks from even feeding each other directly, represents in a war-torn society a rather complex haven; like Shakespeare's retreats, one reflects on its ideals.

What perhaps Siff's own method conveys as a remedy might be how insight may be open to all of us. I was lent this by a teacher (a student of Siff's) after I responded with interest to his suggestion that liberation itself may be a construct. This always made intuitive sense to me. Lately, as an instructor in Comparative Religions, I've found that, without hints, some students have asked the same question.

The teacher Aggachitta may not go this far in his quest for meaning, for he concludes: "It is faith in something that is possible for one to attain because someone once, long ago, attained it." (311) This trust that if one man did it, so may his followers, persists. "Sati," we are told, is not the platitude or buzzword of  'mindfulness," but what's created in meditation and recollection as an imperative to break out of "samsara," the ordered world of mindfulness where all is in place, the "dana" of food and goods is delivered by laity on time, and all know their place. This subversion never overthrows the hermitage, but I wonder if a follow-up novel might do that. Although I was pleased that his characters after a hectic week wound up relieved, I ended this novel with this curiously subversive expectation.

To order or sample chapters: Seeking Nibbana. This review 10-18-23 as a bit altered to Amazon US.

Unlearning Meditation (author's website); I reviewed this 2010 study on Amazon US (7-18-10) and in different form at the New York Journal of Books (8-12-10). For more: Skillful Meditation Project

"Cruel Theory/ Sublime Practice": Book Review

Glenn Wallis, Matthias Steingass, and Tom Pepper reevaluate Buddhism. Dismissing quiescent and supernatural states, they seek a practice grounded in liberating socially engaged agents, committed to intellectual rigor, ideological application, and political confrontation.  If they push Buddhism to the brink, they may glimpse an abyss, or play among the ruins where a tipped, upended rupa shatters. Expanding ideas discussed at the Speculative Non-Buddhism online project, they deny world-transcendence while affirming a collective mind--outside the individual brain--as liberated subjects revitalized, after a truth-event named as Buddhadharma.

This esoteric, exacting study demands concentration. In cruelty, via Antonin Artaud's theater, it unnerves the practitioner. With practice, invigorated by theory, the informed and radicalized subject revives. After Wallis's précis about its individually authored chapters, Tom Pepper rejects an "ultimate cosmopolitan anti-intellectual aesthetic practice" which comprises most of Western Buddhism. In "The Radical Buddhist Subject and the Sublime Aesthetics of Truth," he equates postmodernism with "sophisticated anti-intellectualism." (22)

Given Pepper is a literature professor, I pondered (fresh from reviewing Thomas Pynchon's forthcoming novel Bleeding Edge) if erudite evocations of power and control within Pynchon's works or, for example, Roberto Bolaño's 2666, Don DeLillo's Libra, Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, or José Saramago's allegories and chronicles deserved this tacit dismissal as "anti-intellectual" for their own sophisticated postmodernism. Pepper may intend to blame the secondary orality of postmodern culture. When fewer people read closely, they parrot received ideas with less self-awareness. Such lassitude enables the solipsism of consumers seeking Buddhism now, as marketed often in the West.

Pepper prefers to dismantle philosophical rather than fictional constructs which ease disengaged, dissatisfied audiences away from "the desolate landscape of postmodern thought." He castigates those Western Buddhists who eschew thought within meditation, and those who further "global capitalism" by choosing a more comforting "aesthetic negotiation" which prefers the comfort of beauty to any confrontation with an edgy, uneasy "sublime" harnessed to economic reform and radical change. (23)

Moving from David Hume's aesthetics, through Pali texts, past Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics into Louis Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Pepper promotes as a corrective Alain Badiou's version of the sublime. Here, Pepper's definition meshes with postmodern literature, if by implication: "The sublime assumes a lack or emptiness, a gap in our World, our ideology, and also assumes the emptiness of conventional truth." (58) Pepper sharpens his perceptions, urging the need to acknowledge conventional truth. He reflects on Nagarjuna in light of Hume, Althusser, and the search for the Higgs Boson, as ways to start remapping worlds which stop reifying false premises. He uses Badiou's agency to propose common efforts which, as in the Aristotelian sense of making a habit a commitment to serious play and immersion in moral action, together create social transformation.

How this revives Buddhism might be, Pepper suggests, akin to how Keats's "Ode to Melancholy," the Harry Potter series, or the film Avatar may be studied. Students can unite to dismantle ideology, and to rebuild it. Exposing the mind as the core, not the brain, for "symbolic communication, which must always take place between multiple individuals," Pepper draws on Marx and Lacan (in passing), Badiou, and Buddhist thought for his remodel. (56) This "sublime" may not soothe, but it can awaken. No-self, dependent arising, and conventional truth provide markers by which humans can achieve consciousness rather than submission to "reactionary or obscurantist subjectivity." (83) How this will be achieved pragmatically, as in many manifestos, remains nebulous, but the promise of philosophical and political change lingers. Knowing this dependence on better ideology, and not being discouraged by this necessity to live with an ideological foundation, people by choosing wiser ideological constructions will transform reality.

Elaborating his scrutiny on the Speculative Non-Buddhism site, Glenn Wallis has moved beyond his phenomenologically inflected interpretations infusing his translations of the Dhammapada (2004) and sixteen suttas as Basic Teachings of the Buddha (2007). Neither merits mention in this volume. Currently teaching applied meditation at the Won Institute of Graduate Studies near Philadelphia, he devises "non-buddhism" inspired by the procedures of François Laruelle. Wallis alters "critical operations" to produce "theorems that are buddhistically uninterpretable." (91) He seeks to expose the hidden syntax, the viability of the propositions, and the "ideological excess" within Buddhism. (92)

Through fifty-eight numbered sub-sections of "Speculative Non-Buddhism: X-Buddhist Hallucination and its Decimation," Wallis establishes his terms, with a coda revising a few as a thought-experiment. His training as a Sanskrit and Pali scholar, his incisive tone, and his occluded career as a hardcore punk guitarist (he applies "decimation" as taken from digital sound processing) hover around a set of propositions and definitions. Confronting "x-buddhisms,” (I follow his punctuation) where x="unending modifiers" (93), Wallis locates in each version an embedded "decision" to affirm that type as a synecdoche for the whole of the dharma. The "non-" disables the Buddhist "network of postulation" while enabling Buddhism to remain as a "positive value." (95-96) "Speculation" requires that x-buddhism remain as is, so that critical inquiry may proceed, doing what x-buddhism will not do.

Therefore, integrating Laruelle's "radical immanence," this non-buddhism exposes x-buddhism. It can dissect, say, a concept such as śūnyatā to demonstrate how it works within a "symbolic system" freed from having to prove or disprove the truth-claim of emptiness itself. (103) "Decision" unplugs the current of self-reflexivity, the self-sufficiency of a Buddhist version unable to examine its own syntax. Non-buddhism, neither negating nor affirming Buddhism, incorporates a concerted strategy which "aims to stimulate the cognitive and affective conditions that render decision intelligible." (105)

Ironically, as a doctrine abounding with metaphors of voids, fingers pointing at a moon, discarding rafts, or burning houses down, x-buddhism refuses to notice its “flinch” when presented with these tropes. It resists its radical terms. Within a loop, trapped by clinging, it fails to provide "knowledge of real processes"; tautologically, it whirls within a "matrix of hallucinatory desire" (112). As a counter-measure, Wallis adapts Althusser's formulation of interpellation, the way people are molded into subjects through "ideological state apparatuses," to show how a "contemporary Westerner" refashions into an "x-buddhist subject." (115) Unless the "bad" subject disidentifies (as Althusser's student Michel Pêcheux phrases this oppositional stance) with the community's ideology, that interpretation seems natural and self-evident. This complacency, Wallis (Pepper concurs although nearly no cross-references connect their essays) demonstrates, prevents the adept from challenging, revolting, or leaving the dominant system. Liberation lets go of the "thaumaturgical refuge of x-buddhism" full of "ventriloquized subjects," as the one unthinking one's self as a non-buddhist enters into exile. (121)

Wallis directs the exiled subject towards "non-buddhist terms for practice." (124) Intrigued by the potential within x-buddhism yet no longer bound to its "dharmic norms," he lists three-dozen varieties of a heuristic within which speculation may work. "Buddhemes" as the reiterations of x-Buddhism, Buddhism as a constantly morphing ideology credited to "The Protagonist," a "Gotamic calculus," "humophobia" or a fear of flesh and blood, the "principle of sufficient Buddhism" as a nostrum for all that ails us, "spiritual narcissism," and a "voltaic network of postulation" speckle these exempla with provocative insight if considerable compression. Eager to defeat Buddhism as a "particular variety of sameness," Wallis escorts "x-buddhism's representatives" (136) to his "Great Feast of Knowledge." (144) There, these claimants can hold their own, albeit democratically, under the "same rules of engagement as all of the sciences and the humanities, as all local knowledges." I add that feasters might look up a Chinese student statement issued in June 1986, “The Not-Not Manifesto.” Consider this, cited by Jonathan Spence in his The Search for Modern China: “Not-Not is not the negation of anything.  It is only an expression of itself.  Not-Not is aware that liberation exists in the indefinite.”

Concluding with a thought-experiment substituting non-buddhist terms for x-buddhist ones, Wallis reckons a "decimated calculus" to distinguish, for instance, śūnyatā from "nihility" or "truth of void." He argues that nihility concocts an "antidote to the inexorable human drive toward transcendental illusion." (148-149) If the dharma defines the void while it evades this truth, it cannot endure as it is.

After this pair of scrupulously academic entries, a digressive approach follows from Matthias Steingass, who jumpstarted this Non-Buddhist site after running Der Unbuddhist. "Control" opens with an anecdote about stumbling across a lavish, graphic book of war photography, in a store tucked away within one of Europe's wealthiest cities, and the unease this juxtaposition created. He sidles into a riposte to the supposition by Robert Thurman and Sogyal Rinpoche that the ego is but an "expert at trickery and guile." (161)  Thurman's "terrorist in your brain" can only, it appears, be disarmed by not thinking, a release of the self into pure consciousness.

Steingass pinpoints in Thurman's salvific, Tibetan version of Buddhism a lack of ethical embedding in a "social context." (165) A disengaged version cannot impel followers to awaken. Thurman garbles the roles of Morpheus and Neo from The Matrix with those of the spectator. Steingass confesses confusion why peace-promoting Thurman advocates a film with such a splatter-specked climax. 

Paralleling this viral, slapdash "Neo-Buddhism," Steingass charges Thurman with denying "Tibetan Buddhism's violent heritage." (172)  (Thurman in Joshua Glenn's 1996 Utne Reader interview  "The Nitty Gritty of Nirvana" responded to such allegations. Thurman encourages engaged Buddhism, although his extended paean Inner Revolution, strangely missing from Steingass' citation, will appease no non-buddhists. Why the Dalai Lama Matters speaks for itself.) Charting cruelty within the rise of the Dalai Lamas, Steingass notes that neither a Shangri-La fairytale nor a dynastic clash of titans reveal a realistic approach towards Tibet, drifting as "oscillations in a fantasmatic landscape" mirroring a Western gaze. He nods at Tibet's noble savage as the West's preferred reflection. 

This crosses (if covertly) with Wallis' discussion of the credulous x-buddhist; if x=Tibetan for Steingass, then by adapting Max Weber's definition of a charismatic leader, Steingass reveals how journalists endow the current Dalai Lama with such an aura. Pascal Boyer's notion that most religious concepts serve as parasites on mental systems (akin to the aesthetic, vis-à-vis Pepper's inclusion of Hume) furthers this dependence on evolutionary psychology, an urge to bow before the shaman or submit to the seer. This propensity endures "below the conscious threshold of individual phenomenological access." (186)

As a "ritual specialist," the lama or priest, Steingass elaborates, gets singled out by Western as well as Eastern cultures as special. This human propensity appears deeply rooted in phylogeny, irrespective of explicitly religious manifestations. Icons endure as both gurus and guitar heroes, after all. As another musician-contributor, Steingass segues into how cultural movements and modern music lack a guiding principle or a framing device-- any more than that aligned by Thurman to limit Tibet.

Steingass summons not only Nietzsche and Foucault but Arthur Rimbaud to match Woodstock and intense social experimentation in the 1960s with the arrival of Chögyam Trunpga in the U.S. Blaming that lama for a "here and now" immersion into a simplistic view of reality "as it is," Steingass adapts Wallis' "principle of sufficient Buddhism" to account for what became a perennial philosophy brand of "Neo-Buddhism." (198-199) Unstated by Steingass, Wallis’s analogous appraisal of the “human drive toward transcendental illusion” propels Trungpa’s Shambhala vision. It rushes past ecological issues to assure the retrieval of a basic goodness without situating this phenomenon within consumer capitalism. Trungpa peddled a remedy to "spiritual materialism," yet he failed to analyze the sexual, political and social predicaments his own actions and those of his sangha then generated.

"Just look inside and the rest will follow" keeps the meditator on auto-pilot, according to Steingass.  Post-1968, an insular authenticity at work or play rules. Whether Jimi Hendrix jamming care of vacuum tubes and magnetic tapes invented in WWII (I detect Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow) or Marina Abramović slipping into shamanism as museum performance, capitalism perpetuates the search for the "authentic." It's a long march from Trungpa's childhood in pre-communist Tibet, but these pop gurus--by reproducing aesthetics and commodifying their emanations-- may nudge, however slyly, individuals to find their empowered vocation, to achieve their own self-actualization.

Winding back to what disturbed him in the war photography volume in that elegant bookstore, Steingass reflects that the sudden encounter "shifted my perception and intensified it." (208) Options exist beyond Abramović displaying herself, Hendrix recording at Woodstock, or Trungpa, Sogyal, or Thurman selling entry into a "gated community" of blissful disciples as a portal to freedom. Instead of acceptance or resignation, Steingass concludes, we as liberated spectators turned wise subjects can look at each other differently, as he looked at the war photos, or how museum goers look at an artist as an installation. Abramović posed herself in a gallery where visitors expect to find a framed masterpiece or an imposing sculpture. She tapped into the market, fueled by her own novelty.

Similarly, Steingass reminds us as do his co-contributors separately, Buddhism pulses with a potency that jolts a witness. (The sublime is achieved, not the aesthetic, to apply Pepper’s terms, albeit unspecified by Steingass.) Freeing viewers as actors, as those liberated from consumers to appropriators who own the art, and who create their own, radical reclamation beckons.

Each section contains documentation but each remains autonomous. A few introductory paragraphs by Wallis and three synopses of the chapters by each contributor provide a cursory overview.  The authors could have transcribed a panel discussion on “what is to be done,” sifting and refining their collective ideas. But, this lacks an agenda to synchronize students and critics of Buddhism dissatisfied with so many x-buddhisms. Instead, three authors leave it up to a radicalized reader who will reply with reason to x-buddhisms, to unplug what Wallis hears as their "dharmic vibrato." Moving from in theory from “x” to “non-,” the next step stays shadowed in practice. 

So far, coverage as far as I am aware of the non-buddhist juggernaut outside of predictable blowback at secular or legion x-buddhist sites has lagged in print.  In a recent review at New Clear Vision, "Sacred Activism," I summed up Jay Michaelson’s forthcoming Evolving Dharma. He introduces in a section on secular and non-theistic versions of Buddhism both Speculative Non-Buddhism and Matthew O’Connell’s Post-Traditional Buddhism. Michaelson paraphrases O’Connell’s disenchantment with Tibetan teachings before turning to Wallis.  Michaelson credits “scholar-practitioner” Wallis’s work as “marked by academic sophistication and self-reflexivity,” but concludes that “the actual practice of his sangha is not substantially different from the post-Zen Zen teachers of independent teachers such as Adyashanti” (loc. 1048 in e-galley proof), who gains little elaboration from Michaelson other than that he combines Zen with Vedanta and seeks a non-meditation state of “just sitting.” Michaelson, an adept in the Burmese Hadasi lineage (and as also a Yale Law professor, Ph.D. in Jewish thought, journalist, poet, and LGBT activist himself eclectic) extrapolates Wallis, “perhaps the most theoretically and academically rigorous of the post-post-traditional mavericks,” i.e., a prefix ahead of O’Connell’s own mavericks, as converging despite himself with those who “dispense with theory entirely.” 

Michaelson then muses that the “apophatic mystics” might have been right after all, for the likes of iconoclasts such as Wallis, whom he finds not as far apart from his secular antagonists as Wallis and allies may insist.  To me, Wallis has left the building, and the icon will not return for an encore, but to his critics, the threat of the new boss reclaiming the throne of the old boss, one party line shutting out other gatecrashers at the Feast, has generated mosh-pit jostling, at least on the Net. Pepper, after this book appeared, began his own investigation of the Buddha's "truth-claim," at The Faithful Buddhist.

O’Connell and Steingass try to ease some of the internecine tension, with fora open to more accommodation than excoriation as they ponder competing versions of x-buddhisms. Meditation in particular occupies a zone where practitioners continue to debate how much or how little of the dharma need be perpetuated when it comes to imagining reformed spaces for a skeptical sangha. I repeat Michaelson’s telling phrase: “the actual practice of his sangha” implies that Wallis and non-buddhists comprise already, two years after that site arose, a living entity, beyond—and/or as-- a virtual community. Australian sociologist and Zen student Joanne Miller in Buddhist Meditation and the Internet has examined such communal challenges for those attempting to build a cyber-sangha.

The reader, after examining three expansive exegeses, will find a few hints how to put non-Buddhism into action, in either the virtual or real worlds. Wallis's revised vocabulary as a thought-experiment, Pepper's admonition for an ideologically aware cadre, or Steingass's wish for an invigorated viewer's insight to adapt as a common vision offer suggestions, if inclined toward subtlety or density. The adamant tone of two-thirds of this treatise may daunt some readers, however familiar with Buddhist and philosophical concepts. By contrast, Steingass roams into popular culture and recent history widely, but he shrouds several thematic links. What deserves keeping and what needs discarding from the dharma, after such fierce scrutiny, waits as tenuous. Context may be gleaned by inspecting the Speculative Non-Buddhism website, as well as the emerging perspectives at The Non-Buddhist and Post-Traditional Buddhism and other sites linked therein, but this book does not duplicate (contrary to a claim in the first review extant at Amazon US/UK; my review has been posted there in short form), beyond the numbered elements underlying Wallis's section, the objectives of his original, often contentious, online project.

Encouragingly, this volume moves into fresh areas of inquiry. Pepper's hopes for a revolutionary vanguard and Steingass' concluding appeal to passive consumers turned engaged appropriators of art tend not to intersect on their respective paths to pursue the possibilities of non-Buddhism. However, with Wallis' ambitious formulations as the book's pivot, the patient reader will uncover his or her own suggestive resonances and correspondences. A tighter connection between essays and a bit more proofreading (I tally a few slips in the first section for spelling and usage and a couple in the last) would have amplified the long-range impact of Cruel Theory/ Sublime Practice. All the same, as a re-evaluation and valuation of the hidden drives within Buddhism, this strategy invites those in search of radical renewal.

(Thanks to Camelia Elias, EyeCorner Press, for a review copy. Remake-remodel as edited from above to 3300 words, 3/12/14, at Journal of Buddhist Ethics (2014) 21: 261-271; mostly as above 3100 words 9-9-13 to The Non-Buddhist. Update at TNB on JBE review (and pdf). Finally, 1160 words, revamped at Amazon US 9-8 and British Amazon 9-9-13. Order info.)