Actually, it’s “The Buddha Before he Got Enlightened.” Or so says Jon Haward, the creator of the comic Wasted and his “Tales of the Buddha Before He Got Enlightened.” Of course, Haward didn’t “create” the Buddha, and indeed, this “fat Buddha” is not really based on the historical Buddha but on the Buddhist figure Hotei. (A very common mistake, as longtime readers of the Horse have seen.)

The above comic cover was drawn by Simon Bisley, longtime collaborator of Glenn Danzig. So it turns out there’s just one degree of separation between Danzig and Buddha. (That is, one degree other than me.) …Who knew?

I haven’t seen this comic at my fantastic local comix shop. (All hail HUB Comics!) But I’ll see if I can grab one and check it out. In the meantime, you can preview this clearly irreverent new comic here.

“Merwin moved to Hawaii to study Zen Buddhism in 1976. He eventually settled in Maui and began to restore the forest surrounding his former plantation. Both the rigor of practicing Buddhism and the tropical landscape have greatly influenced Merwin’s later style.”

Read about his appointment to US Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress website, here.

A MAN LAYS DYING on the floor of a jail cell between two mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Not even two weeks ago, despite his middle-age, he’d had a head of youthfully dark hair; now, it is completely, shockingly, all-white. The sprinkler system of the sheriff’s department that holds him has been set off, creating the effect of a tumultuous indoor downpour that rains down upon the white-haired man and his captors.

One of his captors — the very one who has most doggedly pursued him — is kneeling down. The white-haired man has committed the kind of unthinkable crimes that would disgust and shake most of us to the core, but Special Agent Dale Cooper instead remains very much with the moment. He holds the white-haired man, stroking his hair, comforting him even as the horrors of his crimes are finally admitted between last gasps. Then, Cooper speaks. The words come to him naturally:

“Leland,” he says, “the time has come for you to seek the path. Your soul has set you face to face with the clear light and you are now about to experience it in all its reality, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, and the naked, spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum, without circumference or center. Leland, in this moment, know yourself, and abide in that state. . . Look to the light, Leland. Find the light.”

Though spoken as much from the heart as from the head, Coop’s words are not truly his own. Compare them with this famous passage from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, meant to be recited to the dying as they pass on:

“O, nobly-born [so and so by name], the time hath now come for thee to seek the Path [in reality]. Thy breathing is about to cease. Thy guru hath set thee face to face before with the Clear Light; and now thou art about to experience in its Reality in the Bardo state, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, and the naked, spotless intellect is like unto a transparent vacuum without circumference or centre. At this moment, know thou thyself, and abide in that state.” [W.Y. Evans-Wentz (translator and editor), The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Oxford, Third edition, 1957)]

Leland, though in his final moment, is surprised, almost smiling, in response to Coop’s urging that he find the light: “I see it!”

“Into the light, Leland,” Coop says, ” Don’t be afraid.”

And with that, Leland Palmer is dead.

It’s unusually moving; hardly your typical primetime TV jailhouse scene.

But this is no ordinary jailhouse, and it’s certainly not ordinary TV.

This is Twin Peaks, where nothing — not family, not FBI-men, not even the owls in the trees — is as it seems.

FAST-FORWARD SEVENTEEN YEARS OR SO and you’ll find that Leland Palmer has, in fact, been reborn.

It’s not the kind of karmic (or, “dharmic”) rebirth that Special Agent Cooper was shooting for, but Leland and the entire Twin Peaks cast have found new life in a definitive Gold Box set that collects each of the show’s 29 episodes, remastered, along with some fascinating behind-the-scenes extras.

The show was, of course, a true pop-culture phenomenon in the early 90s. The brainchild of writer-directors Mark Frost and David Lynch, it posed a now-famous question, one that was never meant to be answered – Who killed Laura Palmer? — and then, bafflingly, went ahead and filled in the blank. A full viewing of the series makes clear a sad truth with which even its creators agree: without that question, the show, despite guidance from directors like Diane Keaton, Uli Edel, and Lynch himself, became more or less direction-less. (Luckily, when Coop’s nemesis Windom Earle finally appeared in the last few episodes, he brought with him a renewed sense of the old Twin Peaks spirit. By then, though, most viewers had long ago lost the thread and weren’t interested in looking for it anymore.)

But throughout Twin Peaks’ run, there’s one constant: Dale Cooper. Played with quirky confidence by previous Lynch co-conspirator Kyle MacLachlan (Dune, Blue Velvet), Coop was young, handsome, and — by all network TV standards of the time — seriously weird. Though a bit of a goody-two-shoes, Cooper was somehow, enviably, cool — a thumbs-up, yet decidedly non-Fonzarelli kind of cool. And his contagious, can-do-it demeanor was upstaged only by his stated work-style, made from a mix of “Bureau guidelines, deductive technique, Tibetan method, instinct, and luck.”

All this, of course, makes him eminently watchable. But he’s more than that. He’s more, even, than the top-notch lawman that Twin Peaks’ Sheriff Harry Truman (yes, that’s the character’s name) defends Coop as. He may even be a bodhisattva.

Now, it should be said that David Lynch is not a Buddhist, and there’s no word on co-creator Mark Frost’s spiritual leanings. But no matter. Neither Lynch nor Frost needed to be Buddhist to create Dale Cooper any more than Bob Kane needed nocturnal crimefighting experience to create Batman. Or, to put it another way, as Lynch recently wrote in his fantastic book Catching the Big Fish, “The filmmaker doesn’t have to be suffering to show suffering.”

But: it should also be said that, while Lynch is no Buddhist — and, fairly or not (probably not), the show is primarily identified with Lynch — he is in fact a meditator. For some thirty-four years, he’s been a practitioner of TM, or Transcendental Meditation, as taught by the famous/infamous Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and thrust into the public’s collective consciousness by John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney. (Ringo Starr tolerated their dabblings but would have preferred that the other three Beatles focus instead on music.) So it’s not a stretch to see, as one astute and excellent friend has suggested, that Coop is Lynch. It’s all a matter of, as Bill Clinton put it, what your definition of “is” is.
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LIKE LYNCH, COOP delights, wholeheartedly, in the odd. Like Lynch, he believes in the power of dreams and intuition. He marvels at the mysteries of the natural world, and he’s fascinated, lovingly, with human beings and what makes them tick. As such, Twin Peaks can be argued to be a meditation on life, death, good, evil, and identity as seen through Lynch and Cooper’s shared vision.

Also like Lynch, Coop is a meditator, as is confirmed in episode #28. (He reports to his assistant Diane that he’s been meditating in lieu of sleep, which has not been coming easily what with the goings-on in Twin Peaks; what’s not said is whether or not he has an ongoing meditation practice.) So, he shares with his (co-)creator an active interest in how he can better perceive Reality by first looking closely at his own mind. More important, though: Agent Cooper seems to be a fine Dharma-friend to his colleagues at the Sheriff’s Department. Whether any of them know it, or care, or not.

Unashamed of his intellectual and spiritual sides, it’s not long before Cooper’s got the entire Department not just tolerating his ways, but playing happily along. In an early episode, he gathers them in the woods for an experiment: Employing a blackboard that he’s dragged into the great outdoors, he gives the TPSD crew a summary of his admiration for His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as well as a quick Tibetan History lesson. Then, he asks them to indulge his beliefs about “deductive technique, Tibetan method, instinct, and luck” with a session of absolutely unorthodox, dream-informed mind-storming meant to sort all the wheat from the chaff in the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder.

Though initially skeptical, his colleagues warm to Coop’s unusual ways; they suspend all they know — or think they know — and instead trust and affirm their new partner-in-crimefighting. In a following scene, we even see Lucy Moran, the supposedly ditzy Department receptionist, reading a massive hardcover book marked, simply, Tibet.

Now, Dale Cooper never declares himself to be “a Buddhist.” But that too is of no matter.

What matters is the way he connects with and inspires the people around him; the way he lives every moment as truly and deeply as he knows how.

He lives in exactly this way even when his methods have clearly failed him.

At one point in the series (I’m doing my best to exclude any spoilers here!), Coop is, at least temporarily, stripped of his FBI badge and gun in response to what the Bureau sees as a cavalier and dangerous attitude. But the former Special Agent is nonplussed. While he feels that his dressing-down is the result of Washington’s short-sighted- and closed-mindedness, he goes with the flow even as bureaucratic justice goes unserved. He’s come to love Twin Peaks — the people, the town, the unanswered questions that seem to reproduce like dandelions — and so he takes his ex-agent status as an opportunity, forgoing the G-man outfit that he wears so nattily for more region-appropriate duds. Cooper, it seems, is just as comfortable in lumberjack’s flannel as he is in his old standard-issue black-jacket, white-shirt, black-necktie outfit. He evens starts investigating local real-estate offerings, thinking that he might just have found his home. Right where he is.

And what is it that could fill the gap in his life now that his career — to which he has been so dedicated — might be going the way of Twin Peaks’ endangered pine weasel? Coop, unashamed and calmly excited as ever, states his new priority himself:

“Seeing beyond fear, and looking at the world with love.”

[See also:  David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE: More of a Dharma connection.]

So, what is it? io9 has the report, and a couple more samples (including Spider-Man and Ultraman). (And no, “Buddhist comic geek” is not a slam. I’m one of’ em.)

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.

See the website of the great Beautiful/Decay magazine. And let the Horse know what you think.

Hat tip to kin.

Here are the details about getting tickets:

Date: Sunday, October 4, 2009
Time: 7pm – 9pm
Location: Cambridge YMCA Theatre
820 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge MA02139
Tickets Available: 1-800-838-3006 or: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/73386

And, here’s a clip:

Beautiful, ain’t it?

In case you didn’t know: it’s a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi, imprisoned leader of the National League for Democracy in Burma, as rendered by the great Shepard Fairey. You know, he of the Obama “Hope” poster, the famous “Obey/Giant” campaign, and a zillion other things.

I for one feel that we’re quite fortunate that the attentions and talents of so gifted a visual communicator are being applied to something that so many people in our community care so deeply about.

(If you’re reading this right now, you’re part of that community. At least that’s how I see it.)

The Obama/Hope image, which became truly ubiquitous, is only one example of how much real, capital-H Hope — and possibility – a good image can convey. And it seems that, more and more, this is becoming Fairey’s stock in trade. Though he can paint a bleak — but often necessary — picture with some of his images, he does “Hope” very, very well.

He sure has here, hasn’t he? And I think when it comes to Aung San Suu Kyi, the more Hope we can muster, the better.

“advertises something called the Samsara Motel, a place where ‘you come back over and over again.’ While the sign’s blinking lights and mid-century design conjure up images of the Vegas Strip, circa 1955, the name of the hotel points in a very different direction. (In Buddhism, ’samsara’ refers to the cycle of life, death and rebirth that precedes nirvana.)”

The show can be found at Wolcott Eco Office, at 28 Wolcott Street in Providence.