…just typically lame? See this (unfortunately typo-laden) report.

I’ll spare you the Buddhism/Booty-ism jokes. Besides, the Buddha only appears in a flash or two in this video. Is it insulting to Buddhism? Maybe. But that’s probably the least of its problems.

“Trying to find the words… without being disrespectful.” I think it’s safe to say you’d better try again, Akon. Just as I’m trying to find the words to describe the way you portray women without being disrespectful. And failing.

I like hip-hop. I like R&B. I like sex. And I’d like to think I have a sense of humor. But this is just vapid, tired, mimbo, bullshit. Buddha or not.

Really, what the hell is going on here?

…From the website JustJaredJR:

“Miley Cyrus sported loveDBM’s cute Buddha bracelet during her recent Wonder World 2009 Tour. JJJ fell in love with the bracelet so much that we’re giving THREE readers a chance to win one!”

If any of this means something to you, fill me in. (Miley can’t be a Buddhist — this is just Buddha-bling — right?) Or click here if you wanna try and win one.

Slight update: The contest is over. But: Good ol’ Konchog Norbu points us to a new quote from Miley, here:

“The one thing Im really strong about regarding my religious beliefs is that you should know a little bit about everything before you define your own beliefs. I think all religions have a good practice in them. Liam and I have been reading about Buddhism lately and it’s all about hope and love. To me, faith is about having a clean slate and a clean start.”

New York City’s Interdependence Project has been, as they say, taking meditation to the streets. First there was their November 2009 “Sit Down, Rise Up” 24-hour meditation marathon in the windows of ABC Carpet. (Video here.) Now, the IDP has gone underground to bring meditation to light.

This new public meditation — which the IDP calls an “Inter-Act,” and which Director of Arts and Communication Josh Adler describes as “a new type of performance art and civic engagement” — took place in an NYC subway tunnel: the one at Port Authority to be exact. A “challenging environment to try and meditate in,” to be sure. So, how did it go?

Well, the cops may have not liked it so much, but there surely can’t be a problem with walking meditation when sitting doesn’t work. And, as Adler states, the IDP intends to keep going. To join them, visit the IDP or treeplays.com.

“Are we witnessing the second coming of the Buddha?” asked Stephen Colbert in the opening tease of Monday night’s Report. “I’ll believe it when I see it in my grilled cheese sandwich.”

So, Nation, what was it that Colbert was talking about? A run-down and video follow. (more…)

I’m a little late on this one, being that I’m just back from a meditation retreat — it’s best, they say, to take a little time before jumping onto one’s email, etc, to make your post-retreat “re-entry” a bit easier. But when I saw that my dharma-brother-from-a-different mother Konchog Norbu had sent me an email that said, simply, “This one’s for the Horse,” with a link, I had to open it.

And so here it is, “Jessica Simpson Loses It in Buddhist Temple,” a scene from the singer and pretty person’s new show, in which she tries to learn what beauty means to various cultures:

You know, though, I can’t really say anything bad about this. At least she went. And hey, I can’t say I was much better in more than a couple of moments during this past weekend! So, yes, this one really is for The Worst Horse — and by that I mean, the worst horse in all of us. Because we all have “a little more work to do.”

Shep Fairey — he of the ubiquitous Obama poster, the ubiquitous Obey Giant street-art campaign,  and countless other works, has now portrayed the Dalai Lama in this new portrait, Compassion.

You may recall that Fairey recently portrayed Aung San Suu Kyi as well.

Done to celebrate His Holiness’s 75th birthday, Compassion is available from Fairey’s website, and net proceeds will be split between Tibet House and LA Friends of Tibet. (The Dalai Lama’s birthday is on July 6.)

Of the piece, Fairey says:

“I’ve always had great admiration for His Holiness and his non-violent approach to the plight of the Tibetan people. When I was approached with the opportunity to work with this beautiful image as a sanctioned source and create a work that evokes the Dalai Lama’s presence as I feel it, I was thrilled. I hope His Holiness remains a presence of compassion in the world for many birthdays to come!”

Compassion goes on sale at “a random time” today, here. Only 500 will be available, so hurry. UPDATE: all 500 copies have already sold out as of early this afternoon.

Another small update: You might also like seeing this Burmese monk from the Obey archives.

Thanks to Born Infinite for the tip.

With the news that the complete run of The Larry Sanders Show is coming to DVD this September, now seems like fine time to re-present this appreciation of the show from The Worst Horse archives.

This piece was written before the news (2008, to be exact), and so it presents a view of the Show (and its creator-star, Garry Shandling) based on the previously released Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show DVD set.] But all the main points about Larry and Garry apply. So enjoy.

For better or worse, many of us have got our favorite Dharma books and trinkets. Well, I’ve got a new one: the four-disc DVD-set, Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show.

If you’re surprised that some DVDs could become so instantly near and dear as, say, an inscribed book from a teacher or the Manjushri statue that a dear friend gave me (and which is watching me from its perch next to my monitor), that makes two of us. But hear me out.

For those who don’t know: The Larry Sanders Show was one of the funniest, smartest shows ever on TV, period. (You only have to Google to see how widely-shared that opinion is.) The brainchild of the genius comedian Garry Shandling, Larry was a send-up of late-night TV, tracking the life and death of a Tonight-style show and its host, the neurotic but lovable — and very funny — Larry Sanders. But Larry and his staff of competitive LA producers, handlers, and lackeys were, above all, human. All that neurosis and competition make for some cringe-worthy comedy, sure. But there’s a lot of innocence to it all somehow. And once you’ve finished watching the final episode (the last of 23 included in the set) you just might be a little choked up. These fictional — and, again, very funny — people are somehow very real.

That’s by design. Authenticity — being true to the way people actually think, act, and treat each other — plays a major role in the show. “It’s like taking a Buddhist temple bell,” Shandling says, “an authentic, two-thousand year old Buddhist temple bell, and ringing it and going, ‘Can you tell me why that rings so purely?’ [It's] because it’s the real thing.”

“All these people in show business are human beings,” Shandling says.

Shandling, it turns out, is all about The Real Thing. The comedian started the show to, in his words, “discover more, Who am I?” (Director Todd Holland backs this up, saying that “Garry’s obsession is to truly expose the truth about himself.”)

All of this is in line with what might be a surprising element of Shandling’s psychological makeup. He’s not just some whiny comedian. He’s a searcher, on a journey to find The Real Thing, and the Real Garry Shandling, in what might seem one of the most unlikely places — Hollywood. He’s a Worst Horse.

It’s in the DVD’s extras that you’ll find the most enlightening moments about the key player on both sides of the camera: in candid visits with his guest-star friends, Shandling reveals an appealingly meditative side. A longtime mindfulness practitioner in Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition, the comedian used these get-togethers not just to catch up with the people he loves, but to make that love plain.

He’s humble when it comes to talking about his practice — it’s not “Hey, look at me.” It’s “Hey, can you help me look at myself?” On Disc One, in talking to former flame Sharon Stone, he offers that he’s keeping up his practice, just before telling her how important she remains to him. On Disc Four, he shows his friend and neighbor Tom Petty his previously private Dharma-tattoo, an enso (or “Zen circle”) inked onto the back of the comedian’s neck to remind him of his work towards, as he says, “ego-emptiness.” And while Shandling laments the camera’s presence at least a couple of times, it’s also clear that he’s trying to be open, to be willing to say and hear things about himself — no matter how intimate. By most accounts, including his own, this is new. His practice is becoming truly integrated with his life.

There are a couple more outward indicators of the Dharma’s influence in Shandling’s life strewn throughout the discs. For example, in a reunion in his real-life living room with the show’s two comedic iron-men — Rip Torn, who played Arthur, Larry’s producer and protector; and Jeffrey Tambor, who, as Sanders’s on-screen sidekick Hank Kingsley, brought the nonsensical catchphrase “Hey now!” into the pop-culture vernacular — we catch a glimpse of Buddhist prayer flags. But it’s in the reflective words of the cast and crew that we get a more concrete sense of how Garry’s drive to get at The Real Thing informs not only his life, but those around them. Tambor, for example, captures this in describing how he was able to make his performance as Hank ring true, no matter how outrageous the scene. When he reveals that “the secret to everything [is,] don’t think,” it’s not a big leap to infer that he’s probably learned how to do this from his friend Garry.

The DVD’s capping phrase comes in its final extra, a short visit with the monk Hann Nguyen, titled “The Journey Continues.” “The true [only] enemy,” as Nguyen tells Garry, “is ignorance.” Then, the screen quickly fades to black. It’s hardly the “last word” that you might expect from a retrospective of one of TV’s most notoriously snarky comedies.

But then, as Garry Shandling clearly knows: if you’ve got a sense of humor, you can find Dharma just about anywhere.

This was posted here a couple of weeks ago:

Well, Lost, my favorite current TV show just got, um, favoriter.

Don’t know how I missed this initially, but one of the newly-returned show’s newest characters, a Japanese guy who is “Master” of the mysterious, rebirth-granting temple recently found by the Losties, is named Dogen. As in “Eihei Dogen,” founder of the Japanese Soto school of Zen Buddhism.

This is probably not insignificant, not on a show whose characters are named things like “John Locke,” “C.S. Lewis,” and “Daniel Faraday.” Also, of course, the whole thing centers around an enigmatic organization called “The Dharma Initiative.”

My eyes will be on the show and on Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Dogen, for more. The second episode of the season is on tonight. Get caught up with last week’s premiere here.

But now, in a new interview with the New Yorker’s Vulture blog, Sanada denies a Buddhist connection:

Dogen translates roughly to “the temple of eternal peace.” Also, Dogen was a thirteenth-century Buddhist teacher. Any significance to your character?

Yeah, he’s not a Buddhist. Dogen’s name is inspired by a famous Buddhist in Japan a long time ago. He’s not a Buddhist, per se; it’s just a name. And also he has another real name from growing up in Japan.

Looks like it’s official: California’s avuncular and sometimes controversial Jerry Brown (who was famously — and, I think it can be said, unfairly — skewered for pushing a form of “Zen fascism” in California Uber Alles, the classic song by Bay Area punk godfathers Dead Kennedys) will be running to be his state’s governor again, CNN reports today. He’d held the position from 1975 to 1983, and is currently the state’s attorney general.

This quote from a new ABC News post gives a sense of Brown’s Buddhist background and how it informs his work:

“I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve lived in Mexico for several months. I’ve lived all over South America. What else have I done? I took Linda Ronstadt to Africa once. I went to Calcutta and worked in an orphanage with Mother Theresa. I went to Japan and practiced zen meditation for six months.

“The essence of that is you meditate not on all of your achievements but on the essential emptiness,” Brown said. “That is pretty big for a politician. There are no politicians with a sense of their own personal emptiness — even though most of them are rather empty.”

Thanks to previous contributor Norbert Hübner for this take on the Japanese word for enlightenment. He writes:

“I’ve heard tales about people being struck by satori in a supermarket aisle, but I never expected it to happen to me. While strolling through the local food discounter, mulling over the mystical experiences of the weekend, I suddenly found the fruits of years of zazen practice right within reach: Satori! I grabbed four packs, so I can have satori each day for the rest of the week. ”