Buddhism, clearly, plays a part in all this (though DeStefano identifies himself primarily as a practitioner of “recovery comedy”). Last night on the show viewers saw Mike’s monster Buddha tattoo (shown here) and also heard a joke that I imagine we’ll be hearing people repeat for a while:

“I went to a Chinese restaurant… They had a suggestion box, so I wrote ‘Free Tibet’.”

(It’s not “What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?*” but, hey, not bad, Mike.)

Other evidence of Mike’s interest in Buddhism? His new comedy album is called OK Karma. And here’s the cover (left).

He’s also written a book entitled Bada Bing Bada Budda.

Check out Mike online, here.

Update: click here to check out DeStefano’s contribution to the (true) storytelling podcast, the program, titled “The Junkie and the Monk.” It’ll give you a taste of Mike’s personality and background and — while it’s seriously rough stuff at times — it’ll make you laugh. You’re gonna like this guy.

(* “Make me one with everything.”)

Who knows? But the rags are all saying she’s using Buddhism to find relief from the pressures of jail.

Quoth The Daily Star (for example):

Wild child Lindsay Lohan is turning to Buddhism to get her through her jail hell.

The off-the-rails star, 24, who has been sentenced to 90 days in prison, has decided to seek solace in the religion in a bid to conquer her demons.

An insider revealed: “Lindsay’s been fascinated in the Buddhist faith for a while as several of her inner circle follow the teachings of Buddhism.

“Lindsay’s devastated about the jail sentence and has been crying non-stop. She’s been told to seek spiritual guidance and find her inner peace.

“She’s decided to study the art of meditat­ion so she can stay calm through breathing techniques while she’s in jail.”

Same old story: Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t. Maybe she’s sincere, maybe she isn’t. All snarkiness aside, let’s just hope she gets better. And let’s hope our media does, too.

“”For 13 years I’ve been into Zen Buddhism,”  he begins. “I only understood it a few weeks ago.” Read more here.

Thanks to Danny Fisher for the tip.

Superstar entertainer Cher has said she is now a Buddhist, but added with characteristic self-deprecation, “who should always be in after-school detention.” [...] I’ve played around with Buddhism for years,” continues the actress, a devotee of the American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron. “The soul of the universe, everything that I need, I can find in its practice.”

That new issue of AD is on stands now.

Related (well, not really, but also from today’s news): NFL star Ricky Williams is a meditator.

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.
.

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.]

Look, I’m all for having a larf, but as one friend said to me:  “Very sad that someone actually paid money to do that.” And as I said back, “What if — just what IF — the dude is sincere? Not that I think that horrible Nike ad helps that argument…”

Seriously, he wrote that. See it here. He had to be kidding, not knowing it was going to be as bad as it was, but still — kinda unfortunate.

Buddhists protesting by throwing stones? Ridiculous.

Isn’t it?

Update: the Sri Lankan government has denied Akon a visa.

March 24 update: Akon has postponed his Sri Lanka tour.

March 27 update, via tamilweek.com: “Akon visa denial has wider impact on Sri Lanka and Buddhism”

The tattoo in question, via farm4.static.flickr.com

Sports site TSN reports that:

“English welterweight Dan (The Outlaw) Hardy’s stomach tattoo was airbrushed out of the UFC 111 fight poster because it is ‘anti-Chinese government stuff,’ according to UFC president Dana White.

‘”I’m trying to get into China,” he told fans at a question-and-answer session Tuesday. ‘I don’t need anti-Chinese government stuff on my fighters.’

“Hardy, however, says the tattoo — the fighter’s favourite — is a Tibetan Buddhist prayer written in Sanskrit.

‘”It’s basically just like a prayer for focus,’ Hardy said. ‘It keeps me walking the path that I should be walking without veering off and distracting myself.’

“Apprised of that explanation, White said: ‘That’s not what I heard.’

[...] “‘I heard that it was anti-Chinese government, so I ripped that thing off it. I’m not going to put him on a poster with anti-Chinese government writing on it when we’re trying to get into China. . . . I don’t know what this stuff means, so I’ve got to be safe.’

But, as the MMA site Bloody Elbow (nice name, that) points out:

“The tattoo is the well known Buddhist mantra “Om mani padme hum” which has no political significance in relation to China.”

Well, not quite no political significance.  While the tattoo isn’t an overt anti-China statement, China sure is sensitive to hearing about Tibetan Buddhism. Some, like Robert Thurman, would even go so far as to say that the Chinese government is trying ‘re trying to, um, airbrush it away.