I would like to say a few words about how Nichiren Buddhism is practiced in
Nichiren Shu.
First of all - the Odaimoku is the primary essential practice for
us.
Simply chanting Namu Myoho Renge Kyo is a prayer, a vow, an
aspiration, a meditation, an expression of faith and joy, and many
other things.
Going by chapters 10, and 17-19 of the Lotus Sutra the one thing that
will bring more merit than even the first five perfections of
generosity, virtue, patience, energy, and concentration is to have a
single moment of faith and rejoicing in the Wonderful Dharma of the
Lotus Flower Sutra.
In this sense faith is not blind belief but rather an abiding trust
and confidence in the Wonderful Dharma to the extent that one's
heart is full to overflowing with joy.
And the Wonderful Dharma is what is revealed in chapter 16 - the
Eternal Life of the Buddha. But this is not about trusting that
there is some Buddha-in-the-Sky or merely in some idea of
everlasting life. Rather, the Eternal Shakyamuni Buddha of chapter
16 personally manifests the Unborn, the Deathless, that which is the
ineffable and unconditioned true nature of life. By opening our
minds and hearts to this - one is freed of suffering and able to
experience a boundless freedom and joy in this very life - even in
the midsts of continuing challenges and problems.
Speaking for myself, I see the Odaimoku as an expression of our
aspiration to attain buddhahood for the sake of all beings, as an
expression of the realization of the Unborn and Deathless nature of
buddhahood which embraces us and also resides within our lives in
every moment, and finally as an expression of our dedication to
share this practice and its incalculable merit with others.
We do not have to self-consciously ruminate on any of these things
but it makes our practice of Odaimoku much more meaningful, I think,
to have them in our awareness as we chant Odaimoku.
As I have said in other places and at other times, when chanting
Odaimoku I think we should have the conviction that if we are
chanting with sincerity and faith then we are in the presence of the
Gohonzon, wherever we are and regardless of whether we have some
Omandala or other representation of it enshrined or not. The
Gohonzon is the true nature of our life just as it is, and Odaimoku
can act like a key that can open up our awareness of it.
In chanting Odaimoku with faith in the presence of the Gohonzon, we
should present ourselves just as we are - with all of our worries,
hopes, fears, anxieties, concerns, determinations, wishes, issues,
and aspirations. We should allow the Odaimoku to embrace all of it
and raise it up to illuminate all of it in the light of the Buddha-
nature. All of these things are the raw material of our life, and
all of it is the nourishing muddy water out of which our buddhahood
will blossom. But we do not need to neurotically fixate on these
things either. We should chant about them and just let them go, and
return to just abiding in faith with the sound of Odaimoku. If
concerns or wishes or fears or regrets or hope come up again, just
be aware of them, illuminate them with Odaimoku, and let them go. If
we start to reflect on the deeper meaning of Odaimoku as I discussed
above, just be aware of that, illuminate it also, and let it go.
Accept who you are and what you are as the raw material of
buddhahood. Embrace it all - and keep centering of the Odaimoku.
There is no right or wrong way to do this besides just chanting and
being present with the Odaimoku as the expression of our Buddha-
nature in action.
Now the Odaimoku is an expression of intent. The Odaimoku or Sacred
Title can be chanted in other ways. Linguists have told me Nichiren
may have pronounced it slighly differently than we do. And Nichiren
never said the seven characters of Odaimoku should only be
pronounced the Sino-Japanese way. Different Chinese dialects, and
other languages that use Chinese characters like Korean or
Vietnamese all have their own way of pronouncing those characters.
One might also try the Sanskrit title. But the important thing is to
express one's personal heart-felt faith and joy in the Wonderful
Dharma of the Lotus Sutra as it has been handed down to us from
Kumarajiva to Chih-i to Miao-lo to Saicho to Nichiren and now to us.
Do not confuse linguistics and lip service for faith and sincerity.
Nichiren also admonished people not to praise the sutra with their
lips but then slander it in their hearts. I personally think there
is a powerful linkage back to that whole lineage by chanting the
Odaimoku in Sino-Japanese as I have personally received it from my
own teachers, but I hope that people don't superstitiously get
attached to the mere words or pronounciation but look more deeply
into what Odaimoku is pointing to and expressing. It is something
beyond speech that neverthless embraces speech.
So the Odaimoku is our primary essential practice as Nichiren
Buddhists, and I want to make sure no one is confused on that point.
We do have many other practices that are supportive of Odaimoku -
reciting the Lotus Sutra (esp. chapters 2 and 16), copying the
Odaimoku, or the Lotus Sutra, or images of the buddhas and
bodhisattvas, and protective deities, studying and discussing the
Lotus Sutra and gosho and Buddha Dharma in general, silent
meditation, guided meditation, walking meditation, liturgical hymns
(shomyo) and many other ways of developing and expression our
devotion (Namu) to the Wonderful Dharma (Myoho) of the Lotus Flower
(Renge) Teaching (Kyo). But all of them point back to Odaimoku as
the primary essential practice and the Odaimoku points us to the
Unborn and Deathless true nature of life.
Perhaps, due to different tastes and associations and
individual attachments and aversions, not everyone will feel a
connection with Odaimoku. That should be respected. We can not and
should not try to force people to take up a practice that they don't
feel is right for them. But I do believe that if given a chance,
Odaimoku can prove to be quite multi-faceted and indeed I believe
its practice will mature as the practitioner matures and that it
will more than facilitate that maturation. In fact, I believe it can
act as a catalyst for spiritual growth if given a chance and not
blocked by our own blindness or stubborness (and even that might be
broken through). So for some the Odaimoku might start out as a way
of feeling magically in control of one's life. Then it might become
a way of feeling empowered, a kind of all-purpose affirmation. Then
it might become a mantra for meditation, or a koan for
contemplation. It might be an expression of devotion to the Eternal
Buddha and a way of praising and feeling embraced by the Eternal
Buddha. Others might use it as a way of being mindful of the Dharma
at all times. And then of practitioners may experience it as the
unfolding of faith into wisdom. So the Odaimoku may seem to be a
single simple practice, but I believe it actually embodies many
different practices and approaches.
But the important thing in Nichiren Shu is just this - just chant
Odaimoku and see where it takes you. If all these other approaches
or methods can help you deepen your faith, appreciation, and
understanding than take advantage of them. But the important thing
is to just chant Odaimoku for that is the heart of Buddha Dharma in
the faith, teaching, and practice of our school of Buddhism.
If someone were coming to me for the first time and wanted to begin
learning about Nichiren Buddhism - this is where I would start. And
it would be a constant reference point throughout. And in the end,
whatever else may be studied or whatever other practices I might
help someone cultivate - they would all come back to this.
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei
Greetings from Idiot America
CREATIONISM. INTELLIGENT DESIGN. FAITH-BASED THIS. TRUST-YOUR-GUT
THAT. THERE'S NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO ESPOUSE, PROFIT FROM, AND
BELIEVE IN UTTER, UNADULTERATED CRAP. AND THE CRAP IS RISING SO HIGH,
IT'S GETTING DANGEROUS.
by Charles P. Pierce | Nov 01 '05
There is some undeniable art—you might even say design—in the way
southern Ohio rolls itself into northern Kentucky. The hills build
gently under you as you leave the interstate. The roads narrow beneath
a cool and thickening canopy as they wind through the leafy outer
precincts of Hebron—a small Kentucky town named, as it happens, for
the place near Jerusalem where the Bible tells us that David was
anointed the king of the Israelites. This resulted in great literature
and no little bloodshed, which is the case with a great deal of Scripture.
At the top of the hill, just past the Idlewild Concrete plant, there
is an unfinished wall with an unfinished gate in the middle of it.
Happy, smiling people are trickling in through the gate this fine
morning, one minivan at a time. They park in whatever shade they can
find, which is not much. It's hot as hell this morning.
They are almost uniformly white and almost uniformly bubbly. Their
cars come from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio and Illinois and as far
away as New Brunswick, Canada. There are elderly couples in shorts,
suburban families piling out of the minivans, the children all
Wrinkle-Resistant and Stain-Released. There is a clutch of Mennonite
women in traditional dress—small bonnets and long skirts. All of them
wander off, chattering and waving and stopping every few steps for
pictures, toward a low-slung building that seems from the outside to
be the most finished part of the complex.
Outside, several of them stop to be interviewed by a video crew. They
have come from Indiana, one woman says, two toddlers toddling at her
feet, because they have been home-schooling their children and they
have given them this adventure as a kind of field trip. The whole
group then bustles into the lobby of the building, where they are
greeted by the long neck of a huge, herbivorous dinosaur. The kids run
past that and around a corner, where stands another, smaller dinosaur.
Which is wearing a saddle.
It is an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a
dinosaur used for dressage competitions and stakes races. Any working
dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other
dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would wear a sturdy
western saddle.
This is very much a show dinosaur.
The dinosaurs are the first things you see when you enter the Creation
Museum, which is very much a work in progress and the dream child of
an Australian named Ken Ham. Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis,
an organization of which the museum one day will be the headquarters.
The people here today are on a special tour. They have paid $149 to
become "charter members" of the museum.
"Dinosaurs," Ham laughs as he poses for pictures with his visitors,
"always get the kids interested."
AIG is dedicated to the proposition that the biblical story of the
creation of the world is inerrant in every word. Which means, in this
interpretation and among other things, that dinosaurs coexisted with
man (hence the saddles), that there were dinosaurs in Eden, and that
Noah, who certainly had enough on his hands, had to load two
brachiosaurs onto the Ark along with his wife, his sons, and their
wives, to say nothing of green ally-gators and long-necked geese and
humpty-backed camels and all the rest.
(Faced with the obvious question of how to keep a
three-hundred-by-thirty-by-fifty-cubit ark from sinking under the
weight of dinosaur couples, Ham's literature argues that the dinosaurs
on the Ark were young ones, and thus did not weigh as much as they
might have.)
"We," Ham exclaims to the assembled, "are taking the dinosaurs back
from the evolutionists!" And everybody cheers.
Ham then goes on to celebrate the great victory won in Oklahoma,
where, in the first week of June, Tulsa park officials announced a
decision (later reversed) to put up a display at the city zoo based on
Genesis so as to eliminate the "discrimination" long inflicted upon
sensitive Christians by a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh that
decorated the elephant exhibit.
This is a serious crowd. They gather in the auditorium and they listen
intently, and they take copious notes as Ham draws a straight line
from Adam's fall to our godless public schools, from Darwin to gay
marriage. He talks about the triumph over Ganesh, and everybody cheers
again.
Ultimately, the heart of the museum will be a long walkway down which
patrons will be able to journey through the entire creation story.
This, too, is still in the earliest stages of construction. Today, for
example, one young artist is working on a scale model of the moment
when Adam names all the creatures. Adam is in the delicate process of
naming the saber-toothed tiger while, behind him, already named, a
woolly mammoth seems to be on the verge of taking a nap.
Elsewhere in the museum, another Adam figure is full-size, if
unpainted, and waiting to be installed. This Adam is reclining
peacefully; eventually, if the plans stay true, he will be placed in a
pool under a waterfall. As the figure depicts a prelapsarian Adam, he
is completely naked. He also has no penis.
This would seem to be a departure from Scripture inconsistent with the
biblical literalism of the rest of the museum. If you're willing to
stretch Job's description of a "behemoth" to include baby brachiosaurs
on Noah's Ark, as Ham does in his lectures, then surely, since we are
depicting him before the fall, Adam should be out there waving
unashamedly in the paradisaical breezes. For that matter, what is Eve
doing there, across the room, with her hair falling just so to cover
her breasts and midsection, as though she's doing a nude scene from
some 1950s Swedish art-house film?
After all, Genesis 2:25 clearly says that at this point in their
lives, "And the man and his wife were both naked, and they were not
ashamed." If Adam courageously sat there unencumbered while he was
naming saber-toothed tigers, then why, six thousand years later,
should he be depicted as a eunuch in some family-values Eden? And if
these people can take away what Scripture says was rightfully his,
then why can't Charles Darwin and the accumulated science of the past
150-odd years take away all the rest of it?
These are impolite questions. Nobody asks them here by the cool pond
tucked into a gentle hillside. Increasingly, nobody asks them outside
the gates, either. It is impolite to wonder why our parents sent us
all to college, and why generations of immigrants sweated and bled so
their children could be educated, if it wasn't so that we would all
one day feel confident enough to look at a museum filled with
dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Belmont and make the not
unreasonable point that it is all batshit crazy and that anyone who
believes this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects
and his own money.
Dinosaurs with saddles?
Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark?
Welcome to your new Eden.
Welcome to Idiot America.
LET'S TAKE A TOUR, shall we? For the sake of time, we'll just cover
the last year or so. A federally funded abstinence program suggests
that HIV can be transmitted through tears. An Alabama legislator
proposes a bill to ban all books by gay authors. The Texas House
passes a bill banning suggestive cheerleading. And nobody laughs at
any of it, or even points out that, in the latter case, having Texas
ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn. James
Dobson, a prominent conservative Christian spokesman, compares the
Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent
conservative preacher, says that federal judges are a more serious
threat to the country than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text
from the Book of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States
should get with it and snuff the democratically elected president of
Venezuela.
The Congress of the United States intervenes to extend into a
televised spectacle the prolonged death of a woman in Florida. The
majority leader of the Senate, a physician, pronounces a diagnosis
based on heavily edited videotape. The majority leader of the House of
Representatives argues against cutting-edge research into the use of
human stem cells by saying that "an embryo is a person. . . . We were
all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So
was Jesus of Nazareth." Nobody laughs at him or points out that the
same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or whoever invented the
baby-back rib.
And, finally, in August, the cover of Time —for almost a century the
dyspeptic voice of the American establishment—clears its throat, hems
and haws and hacks like a headmaster gagging on his sherry, and asks,
quite seriously: "Does God have a place in science class?"
Fights over evolution—and its faddish new camouflage, intelligent
design, a pseudoscience that posits without proof or method that
science is inadequate to explain existence and that supernatural
causes must be considered—roil up school districts across the country.
The president of the United States announces that he believes ID ought
to be taught in the public schools on an equal footing with the theory
of evolution. And in Dover, Pennsylvania, during one of these many
controversies, a pastor named Ray Mummert delivers the line that both
ends our tour and, in every real sense, sums it up:
"We've been attacked," he says, "by the intelligent, educated segment
of the culture."
And there it is.
Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things. It's not
the place where people believe in silly things. It is not the place
where people go to profit from the fact that people believe in silly
things. Idiot America is not even those people who believe that Adam
named the dinosaurs. Those people pay attention. They take notes. They
take the time and the considerable mental effort to construct a
worldview that is round and complete.
The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not
so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that
Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years
ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot
America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more
cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the
breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It
also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we
should trust the least are the people who best know what they're
talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a
preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert,
then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where
everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.
In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a
moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or
kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by
calling it "common sense." The president's former advisor on medical
ethics regularly refers to the "yuck factor." The Gut is common. It is
democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears.
Worst of all, the Gut is faith-based.
It's a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, "faith-based," a cheap
huckster's phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an
artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine.
It's a word for people without the courage to say they are religious,
and it is beloved not only by politicians too cowardly to debate
something as substantial as faith but also by Idiot America, which is
too lazy to do it.
After all, faith is about the heart and soul and about transcendence.
Anything calling itself faith-based is admitting that it is secular
and profane. In the way that it relies on the Gut to determine its
science, its politics, and even the way it sends its people to war,
Idiot America is not a country of faith; it's a faith-based country,
fashioning itself in the world, which is not the place where faith is
best fashioned.
Hofstadter saw this one coming. "Intellect is pitted against feeling,"
he wrote, "on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm
emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed
that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily
into the sly or the diabolical."
The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America. We hold
these truths to be self-evident:
1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or
otherwise moves units.
2) Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by
how fervently they believe it.
How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, a newspaper
account of the "intelligent design" movement contained this remarkable
sentence: "They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to
evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe
academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders
firmly on the defensive."
A "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently
ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry
would be. It makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on
gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy Party ticket.
It doesn't matter what percentage of people believe they ought to be
able to flap their arms and fly, none of them can. It doesn't matter
how many votes your candidate got, he's not going to turn lead into
gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in
it is where it appeared.
On the front page.
Of The New York Times .
Within three days, there was a panel on the subject on Larry King Live
, in which Larry asked the following question:
"All right, hold on. Dr. Forrest, your concept of how can you
out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are
there still monkeys?"
And why do so many of them host television programs, Larry?
This is how Idiot America engages the great issues of the day. It
decides, en masse, with a thousand keystrokes and clicks of the remote
control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both
must be right, or at least not wrong. And the poor biologist's words
carry no more weight than the thunderations of some turkey-neck
preacher out of the Church of Christ's Own Parking Facility in DeLand,
Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert"
and, therefore, an "elitist." Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him
on cable. He's brilliant, surely, but his Gut's the same as ours. He
just ignores it, poor fool.
This is a great country, in no small part because it is the best
country ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation
so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should its people
hold nutty ideas but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine
them up, and put them right there on the mantelpiece. This is still
the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. The
right to do so is there in our founding documents.
After all, the Founders were men of the Enlightenment, fashioning a
country out of new ideas—or out of old ones that they excavated from
centuries of religious internment. Historian Charles Freeman points
out that in Europe, "Christian thought . . . often gave irrationality
the status of a universal 'truth' to the exclusion of those truths to
be found through reason. So the uneducated was preferred to the
educated, and the miracle to the operation of natural laws."
In America, the Founders were trying to get away from all that, to
raise a nation of educated people. In pledging their faith to
intellectual experimentation, however, the Founders set freedom free.
They devised the best country ever in which to be completely around
the bend. It's just that making a respectable living out of it used to
be harder work.
THEY CALL IT THE INFINITE CORRIDOR, which is the kind of joke you tell
when your day job is to throw science as far ahead as you can and hope
that the rest of us can move fast enough to catch up. It is a series
of connecting hallways that run north through the campus of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The hallways are lined with
cramped offices, their doors mottled thickly with old tape and
yellowing handbills. The Infinite Corridor is not a straight line. It
has branches and tributaries. It has backwaters and eddies. You can
get lost there.
One of the offices belongs to Professor Kip Hodges, a young and
energetic North Carolinian who studies how mountain ranges develop and
grow. Suffice it to say that Hodges's data do not correspond to the
six-thousand-year-old earth of the creationists, whereupon dinosaurs
and naked folks doth gambol together.
Hodges is recently returned from Nepal, where he rescued his research
from encroaching Maoist rebels, who were not interested in the least
in how the Himalayas became the Himalayas. They were interested in
land, in guns, in power, and in other things of the Gut. Moreover,
part of Hodges's duties at MIT has been to mentor incoming freshmen
about making careers in science for themselves.
"Scientists are always portrayed in the literature as being above the
fray intellectually," Hodges says. "I guess to a certain extent that's
our fault, because scientists don't do a good enough job communicating
with people who are nonscientists—that it's not a matter of brainiacs
doing one thing and nonbrainiacs doing another."
Americans of a certain age grew up with science the way an earlier
generation grew up with baseball and even earlier ones grew up with
politics and religion. America cured diseases. It put men on the moon.
It thought its way ahead in the cold war and stayed there.
"My earliest memory," Hodges recalls, "is watching John Glenn go up.
It was a time that, if you were involved in science or
engineering—particularly science, at that time—people greatly
respected you if you said you were going into those fields. And
nowadays, it's like there's no value placed by society on a lot of the
observations that are made by people in science.
"It's more than a general dumbing down of America—the lack of
self-motivated thinking: clear, creative thinking. It's like you're
happy for other people to think for you. If you should be worried
about, say, global warming, well, somebody in Washington will tell me
whether or not I should be worried about global warming. So it's like
this abdication of intellectual responsibility—that America now is
getting to the point that more and more people would just love to let
somebody else think for them."
The country was founded by people who were fundamentally curious;
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, to name only the most obvious
examples, were inveterate tinkerers. (Before dispatching Lewis and
Clark into the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson insisted that the pair
categorize as many new plant and animal species as they found.
Considering they were also mapping everything from Missouri to Oregon,
this must have been a considerable pain in the canoe.) Further, they
assumed that their posterity would feel much the same as they did; in
1815, appealing to Congress to fund the building of a national
university, James Madison called for the development of "a nursery of
enlightened preceptors."
It is a long way from that to the moment on February 18, 2004, when
sixty-two scientists, including a clutch of Nobel laureates, released
a report accusing the incumbent administration of manipulating science
for political ends. It is a long way from Jefferson's observatory and
Franklin's kite to George W. Bush, in an interview in 2005, suggesting
that intelligent design be taught alongside the theory of evolution in
the nation's science classes. "Both sides ought to be properly
taught," said the president, "so people can understand what the debate
is about."
The "debate," of course, is nothing of the sort, because two sides are
required for a debate. Nevertheless, the very notion of it is a
measure of how scientific discourse, and the way the country educates
itself, has slipped through lassitude and inattention across the
border into Idiot America—where fact is merely that which enough
people believe, and truth is measured only by how fervently they
believe it.
If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have
done so by moving the debate into the realm of political and cultural
argument, where we all feel more confident, because it is there that
the Gut rules. Held to this standard, any scientific theory is
rendered mere opinion. Scientific fact is no more immutable than a
polling sample. This is how there's a "debate" over the very existence
of global warming, even though the preponderance of fact among those
who actually have studied the phenomenon renders the "debate" quite
silly. The debate is about making people feel better about driving
SUVs. The debate is less about climatology than it is about
guiltlessly topping off your tank and voting in tax incentives for oil
companies.
The rest of the world looks on in cockeyed wonder. The America of
Franklin and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan project and
the Apollo program, the America of which Einstein wanted to be a part,
seems to be enveloping itself in a curious fog behind which it's tying
itself in knots over evolution, for pity's sake, and over the relative
humanity of blastocysts versus the victims of Parkinson's disease.
"Even in the developing world, where I spend lots of time doing my
work," Hodges says, "if you tell them that you're from MIT and you
tell them that you do science, it's a big deal. If I go to India and
tell them I'm from MIT, it's a big deal. In Thailand, it's a big deal.
If I go to Iowa, they could give a rat's ass. And that's a weird
thing, that we're moving in that direction as a nation."
Hence, Bush was not talking about science—not in any real sense,
anyway. Intelligent design is a theological construct, a faith-based
attempt to gussy up creationism in a lab coat. Its fundamental tenets
cannot be experimentally verified—or, most important, falsified. That
it enjoys a certain public cachet is irrelevant; a higher percentage
of Americans believes that a government conspiracy killed John F.
Kennedy than believes in intelligent design, but there is no great
effort abroad in the land to include that conspiracy theory in
sixth-grade history texts. Bush wasn't talking about science. He was
talking about the political utility of putting saddles on the
dinosaurs and breaking Ganesh's theological monopoly over the elephant
paddock.
"The reason the creationists have been so effective is that they have
put a premium on communication skills," explains Hodges. "It matters
to them that they can talk to the guy in the bar, and it's important
to them, and they are hugely effective at it."
It is the ultimate standard of Idiot America. How does it play to Joe
Six-Pack in the bar? At the end of August 2004, the Zogby people
discovered that 57 percent of undecided voters would rather have a
beer with George Bush than with John Kerry. Now, how many people with
whom you've spent time drinking beer would you trust with the nuclear
launch codes? Not only is this not a question for a nation of serious
citizens, it's not even a question for a nation of serious drunkards.
If even scientific discussion is going to be dragged into politics,
then the discussion there at least ought to exist on a fairly
sophisticated level. Again, the Founders thought it should. They
considered self-government a science that required an informed and
educated and enlightened populace to make all the delicate mechanisms
run. Instead, today we have the Kabuki politics and marionette debates
best exemplified by cable television. Instead, the discussion of
everything ends up in the bar.
(It wasn't always this way. Theodore Roosevelt is reckoned to be the
manliest of our manly-man presidents. He also was a lifelong science
dweeb, cataloging songbirds, of all things. Of course, he shot them
first, so maybe that makes all the difference.)
It is, of course, television that has allowed Idiot America to run
riot within the modern politics and all forms of public discourse. It
is not that there is less information on television than there once
was. (That there is less news is another question entirely.) In fact,
there is so much information that fact is now defined as something
that so many people believe that television notices it, and truth is
measured by how fervently they believe it.
"You don't need to be credible on television," explains Keith
Olbermann, the erudite host of his own show on MSNBC. "You don't need
to be authoritative. You don't need to be informed. You don't need to
be honest. All these things that we used to associate with what we do
are no longer factors.
"There is an entire network [the Fox News Channel] that bills itself
as news that is devoted to reinforcing people's fears and saying to
them, 'This is what you should be scared of, and here's whose fault it
is,' " Olbermann says. "And that's what they get—two or three million
frustrated paranoids who sit in front of the TV and go, 'Damn right,
it's those liberals' fault.' Or, 'It's those—what's the word for it?—
college graduates ' fault.' "
The reply, of course, is that Fox regularly buries Olbermann and the
rest of the MSNBC lineup in breaking off a segment of a smidgen of a
piece of the television audience. Truth is what moves the needle. Fact
is what sells.
Idiot America is a bad place for crazy notions. Its indolent tolerance
of them causes the classic American crank to drift slowly and
dangerously into the mainstream, wherein the crank loses all of his
charm and the country loses another piece of its mind. The best thing
about American crackpots used to be that they would stand proudly
aloof from a country that, by their peculiar lights, had gone mad. Not
today. Today, they all have book deals, TV shows, and cases pending in
federal court.
Once, it was very hard to get into the public square and very easy to
fall out of it. One ill-timed word, even a whiff of public scandal,
and all the hard work you did in the grange hall on all those winter
nights was for nothing. No longer. You can be Bill Bennett, gambling
with both fists, but if your books still sell, you can continue to
scold the nation about its sins. You can be Bill O'Reilly, calling up
subordinates to proposition them both luridly and comically—loofahs?
falafels?—and if more people tune in to watch you than tune in to
watch some other blowhard, you can keep your job lecturing America
about the dangers of its secular culture. Just don't be boring. And
keep the ratings up. Idiot America wants to be entertained.
Because scientific expertise was dragged into political discussion,
and because political discussion is hopelessly corrupt, the distrust
of scientific expertise is now as general as the distrust of
politicians is. Everyone is an expert, so nobody is. For example, Sean
Hannity's knowledge of, say, stem-cell research is measured precisely
by his ratings book. His views on the subject are more well known than
those of the people doing the actual research.
The credibility of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania on the
subject of the cultural anthropology of the American family ought to
be, well, minimal. He spent the summer promoting a book in which he
propounded theories on the subject that were progressively loopier.
"For some parents," he writes, "the purported need to provide things
for their children simply provides a convenient rationalization for
pursuing a gratifying career outside the home." He goes on later to
compare a woman's right to choose an abortion unfavorably with the
institution of slavery. Nevertheless, he's welcome in the mainstream,
at least until either he's defeated for reelection or his book doesn't
sell.
"Somewhere along the line, we stopped rewarding intelligence with
success and stopped equating intelligence with success," Olbermann
says. We're all in the bar now, where everybody's an expert, where the
Gut makes everyone so very sure. All opinions are of equal worth. No
voice is more authoritative than any others; some are just louder. Of
course, the problem in the bar is that sooner or later, for reasons
that nobody will remember in the clear light of the next morning, some
noisy asshole picks a fight. And it becomes clear that the rise of
Idiot America has consequences.
ON THE MORNING of September 11, 2001, nobody in the American
government knew more than Richard Clarke did on the subject of a
shadowy terrorist network called Al Qaeda. He had watched it grow. He
had watched it strike—in New York and in Africa and in the harbor in
Yemen. That morning, in the Situation Room in the White House, Clarke
watched the buildings burn and fall, and he recognized the
organization's signature as well as he'd recognize his own. Instead,
in the ensuing days a lot of people around him—people who didn't know
enough about Al Qaeda to throw to a cat—wanted to talk about Iraq.
What they believed trumped what Clarke knew, over and over again. He
left the government.
"In the 1970s and 1980s, when the key issue became arms control, the
traditional diplomats couldn't do the negotiating because that
negotiating involved science and engineering," Clarke recalls.
"Interagency decision papers were models of analysis, where
assumptions were laid out and tested.
"That's the world I grew up in. [The approach] still applied to
issues, even terrorism. Then these people come in, and they already
have the answers, how to spin it, how to get the rest of the world on
board. I thought, Wait a minute. That isn't analysis. It's the
important issues where we really need analysis.
"In the area of terrorism, there is a huge potential for emotional
reaction. The one thing I told my team [on September 11]—they were mad
and they were crying, the whole range of emotions—was that we didn't
have time for emotion that day."
Nothing that the administration of George W. Bush has done has been
inconsistent with the forces that twice elected it. The subtle,
humming engine of its success—against John Kerry, surely, but most
vividly against poor, cerebral Al Gore—was a celebration of instinct
over intellect, a triumph of the Gut. No campaigns in history employed
the saloon question with such devastating success or saw so clearly
the path through the deliberate inexpertise of the national debate. No
politician in recent times has played to the Gut so deftly.
So it ought not shock anyone when the government suddenly found itself
at odds with empirical science. It ought not shock anyone in the
manner in which it would go to war. Remember the beginning, when it
was purely the Gut—a bone-deep call for righteous revenge for which
Afghanistan was not sufficient response. In Iraq, there would be
towering stacks of chemical bombs, a limitless smorgasbord of deadly
bacteria, vast lagoons of exotic poisons. There would be candy and
flowers greeting our troops. The war would take six months, a year,
tops. Mission Accomplished. Major combat operations are over.
"Part of the problem was that people didn't want the analytic process
because they'd be shown up," Richard Clarke says. "Their assumptions
would be counterfactual. One of the real areas of expertise, for
example, was failed-state reconstruction. How to go into failed states
and maintain security and get the economy going and defang ethnic
hatred. They threw it all out.
"They ignored the experts on the Middle East. They ignored the experts
who said it was the wrong target. So you ignore the experts and you go
in anyway, and then you ignore all the experts on how to handle the
postconflict."
One of those experts was David Phillips, a senior advisor on what was
called the Future of Iraq program for the State Department. Phillips
was ignored. His program was ignored. Earlier, Phillips had helped
reconstruct the Balkans after the region spent a decade tearing itself
apart with genocidal lunacy. Phillips knew what he knew. He just
didn't believe what they believed.
"You can just as easily have a faith-based, or ideologically driven,
policy," he says today. "You start with the presumption that you
already know the conclusion prior to asking the question. When
information surfaces that contradicts your firmly entrenched views,
you dismantle the institution that brought you the information."
There was going to be candy and flowers, remember? The war was going
to pay for itself. Believe.
"We went in blindfolded, and we believed our own propaganda," Phillips
says. "We were going to get out in ninety days, spend $1.9 billion in
the short term, and Iraqi oil would pay for the rest. Now we're deep
in the hole, and people are asking questions about how we got there.
"It's delusional, allowing delusion to be the basis of policy making.
Once you've told the big lie, you have to substantiate it with a
sequence of lies that's repeated. You can't fix a policy if you don't
admit it's broken."
Two thousand American lives later, remember the beginning. One
commentator quite plainly made the case that every few years or so,
the United States should "throw a small nation up against the wall" to
prove that it means business. And Idiot America, which is all of us,
cheered.
Goddamn right. Gimme another. And see what the superpowers in the back
room will have.
AUGUST 19, 2005, was a beautiful day in Idiot America.
In Washington, William Frist, a Harvard-trained physician and the
majority leader of the United States Senate, endorsed the teaching of
intelligent design in the country's public schools. "I think today a
pluralistic society," Frist explained, "should have access to a broad
range of fact, of science, including faith."
That faith is not fact, nor should it be, and that faith is not
science, nor should it be, seems to have eluded Doctor Senator Frist.
It doesn't matter. He was talking to the people who believe that faith
is both those things, because Bill Frist wants to be president of the
United States, and because he believes those people will vote for him
specifically because he talks this rot, and Idiot America will take it
as an actor merely reciting his lines and let it go at that. Nonsense
is a no-lose proposition.
On the same day, across town, a top aide to former secretary of state
Colin Powell told CNN that Powell's pivotal presentation to the United
Nations in which he described Iraq's vast array of deadly weapons was
a farrago of stovepiped intelligence, wishful thinking, and utter
bullshit.
"It was the lowest point in my life," the aide said.
That it has proven to be an even lower point for almost two thousand
American families, and God alone knows how many Iraqis, seems to have
eluded this fellow. It doesn't matter. Neither Frist with his
pandering nor this apparatchik with the tender conscience—nor Colin
Powell, for all that—will pay a substantial price for any of it
because the two stories lasted one day, and, after all, it was a
beautiful day in Idiot America.
Idiot America is a collaborative effort, the result of millions of
decisions made and not made. It's the development of a collective Gut
at the expense of a collective mind. It's what results when
politicians make ridiculous statements and not merely do we abandon
the right to punish them for it at the polls, but we also become too
timid to punish them with ridicule on a daily basis, because the polls
say they're popular anyway. It's what results when leaders are not
held to account for mistakes that end up killing people.
And that's why August became a seminal month in Idiot America.
In its final week, a great American city drowned and then turned
irrevocably into a Hieronymus Bosch painting in real time and on
television, and with complete impunity, the president of the United
States wandered the landscape and talked like a blithering nitwit.
First, he compared the violence surrounding the writing of an
impromptu theocratic constitution in Baghdad to the events surrounding
the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Undaunted, he
later compared the war he'd launched in Iraq to World War II. And then
he compared himself to Franklin Roosevelt. One more public appearance
and we might have learned that Custer was killed by Hezbollah.
Finally, we saw the apotheosis of the end of expertise, when New
Orleans was virtually obliterated as a functional habitat for human
beings, and the country discovered that the primary responsibility for
dealing with the calamity lay with a man who'd been dismissed as an
incompetent from his previous job as the director of a
luxury-show-horse organization.
And the president went on television and said that nobody could have
anticipated the collapse of the unfortunate city's levees. In God's
sweet name, engineers anticipated it. Politicians anticipated it. The
poor bastards in the Ninth Ward certainly anticipated it. Hell, four
generations of folksingers anticipated it.
And the people who hated him went crazy and the people who loved him
defended him. But where were the people who heard this incredible,
staggeringly stupid bafflegab, uttered with conscious forethought, and
realized that whatever they thought of the man, the president had
gotten behind a series of podiums and done everything but drop his
drawers and dance the hootchie-koo? They were out there, lost in Idiot
America, where it was still a beautiful day. Idiot America took it as
a bad actor merely bungling his lines. Nonsense is a no-lose
proposition. For Idiot America is a place where people choose to live.
It is a place that is built consciously and deliberately, one choice
at a time, made or (most often) unmade. A place where we're all like
that statue of Adam now, reclining in a peaceful garden of our own
creation, brainless and dickless, and falling down on the job of
naming the monsters for what they are, dozing away in an Eden that,
every day, looks less and less like paradise.
The following essay is a revised version of a couple of posts from the Nichiren Shu Yahoo group and also offline conversations - it's flaws are mine, but if there is anything worthwhile about them, then I must give credit to my sensei the Ven. Ryusho Matsuda, and my good Dharma-friends Taigen Dan Leigton, Dharmajim, Don Ross, and Valerie Winters who prompted and inspired these reflections.
A few years ago I got obsessed with reading everything by and about
the fourth century monk-scholar Vasubandhu. Vasubandhu was the major
proponent of the Consciousness Only school along with his brother
Asangha. Among other things he wrote the Abhidharmakosha-bhasyam known
to Nichiren as the Kusha Ron. This is the basic source text in Indo-Tibetan
as well as East Asian Buddhism regarding the concept of the afterlife. In that
work is the teaching that one goes to an intermediate state for an
average of 49 days before being reborn in one of the six worlds of
the hells, hungry ghosts, animals, fighting demons, humans, and heavens.
His later Mahayana works about the eight consciousnesses, including
the storehouse consciousness (#8), explains how karma and habit and
certain personality traits can be passed on after the body has died. I
was researching all this for the chapter on the Consciousness Only
teachings in my manuscript Dharma Flower.
At one point I talked to my sensei, the Ven. Ryusho Matsuda, about
maybe having a study group on Vasubandhu's teachings relating to
life after death because so many people were curious about this. My
sensei asked me, "Did Vasubandhu know for himself what happens when we
die?" I had to admit that he did not. "He was speculating wasn't he?" My
sensei persisted. Again, I had to admit that Vasubandhu was just
speculating based on tradition and some rather terse and cryptic
statements in the sutras. So my sensei said, "It is better not to get
people too concerned with such speculations. It is good to study these
things if one wants to. But it is better not to worry about these things but to cultivate Anshin at the moment of death."
My sensei did not elaborate on what he mean by Anshin, because I think
he knew that I understood what he meant. Anshin is composed of two
characters. The first character "An" means "peace" or "tranquility."
The second "shin" means both "mind" and "heart." So one is to
cultivate a mind and heart that is at peace. We do this through our
faith, and by "faith" I mean our trust and confidence in the Wonderful
Dharma and the good causes that have been planted in our lives through
our practice of the Wonderful Dharma.
People approach death with fear and trepidation because they do not
know what is in store for them, or they fear that they will leave
behind all they know, or that death will cut off their plans and
efforts to find fulfillment and meaning in life. It ends all that we
know and presents a great uknown, perhaps even a nothingness and so is
the primary source of anxiety in life - though most try to shut it out
or avoid thinking about it.
Buddhism, however, is in a large part about awakening to the fact that
nothing that we have, nothing that we are is graspeable or permanent.
Buddhism is training in being able to gracefully allow things to be just
as they are - flowing, interdependent, ungraspeable. It is the loss of
self and self-satisfaction that is feared, but Buddhism is an
awakening to the reality that there is no substantial self to lose,
and that the permanent self-oriented satisfaction we seek is
impossible because reality always flows and is a process of constant
giving and taking. In learning to acknowledge and make peace with the
true nature of things we find that it is not so scary or horrible or
meaningless. We might find that the real nature of things is the basis of selfless
compassion, a dynamic unity of all that is, and a sheer
gratuitiousness that gives us the miracle of a life and awareness that
we did nothing to earn or bring about. In lettting go of our
preconceived ideas about who we are or what we should be or on what
terms we can be happy, we attain a liberation that is also an opening
up to something so much greater that it is inconceivable to our normally
conditioned and conditioning attitude and approach to life. This
something greater is the Wonderful Dharma - the uncondtioned true
nature of things. In the Lotus Sutra this Wonderful Dharma is
personified as the Eternal Shakyamuni Buddha and speaks to us so that
we too can recognize this real nature as our own true selfless and
unbound nature. To have confidence and joy in this realization is what
faith means in the context of the Lotus Sutra. It is this which can
bring peace to our heart and mind.
I do not know what will happen when we die. I can not even presume to
know what my state of mind will be if or when I am faced with death
(and many or maybe most people die without a full awareness of what is
happening and by the time the body ceases to function the mind has
long since shut down/departed). But I think I know that each moment we
die to who we think we are and are reborn into new circumstances. If
we can learn to face each moment with Anshin, than odds are better
that we will face even that final moment with Anshin. And this is
something worth chanting about.
Beyond simply letting go and letting be I think there is a further implication or aspect of Anshin or the "Mind that is At Peace." This element or
aspect of Anshin is that the Mind which is At Peace is also a mind
that is open and generous and has no fear and therefore no need to
hold back. It is therefore synonymous with Bodhicitta which
means "The Mind that Aspires to Enlightenment" and Bodhicitta is the
wellspring of the bodhisattva's compassionate vows, aspiration, and
dedication of merits to all beings. It is not just a letting go but
an overflowing generosity. It is not simply a negative or passive state, but a positive state of free-flowing loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity and impartial all-sided generosity.
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei