No, of course not –the guru, per se, doesn’t exist in Zen. Zen has teachers of course, but the distinction is an important one, especially in Tibetan Buddhist tantra, where “one’s teacher is seen as inseparable from the meditational deity and the Three Jewels of Refuge.” (That definition comes from the glossary in Introduction to Tantra, by Lama Yeshe.) Now, being that Chopra is spiritually concerned in a sometimes specific, sometimes dharmic way (and has written about the Buddha in long-prose and comic forms), it’s not surprising that some might get confused. But Tina Brown’s Daily Beast has in fact called him a “Zen guru,” in this report:

That’s right, and congratulations should go not only to him but to the United States for honoring such a talent, and yes, a dharmic force. For those of you who didn’t know about Merwin’s connection to Buddhism, quoth The Poetry Foundation:

“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.

TLC is launching a new show called Food Buddha.

Here’s the host’s site — though it says he’s NOT a Buddhist, he’s said to have a “Zen-like quality” and you click on something that says “Begin Enlightenment” on the launch page to enter.

Zzzzzzz.

If you enjoy this kind of stupidity, you’ll find past Separated at Re-birth installments from The Worst Horse, here, here, and here.

Via AviationRecord.com:

“Korean Air and sister company Hanjin Travel are offering overseas visitors the chance to experience a traditional Korean ‘Templestay’. [...]

“Over the course of 24 hours, visitors have a chance to experience and understand inner temple life and discover the day-to-day activities of a Korean Buddhist Monk.”

Read more here.

Rage Against the Machine, self-titled album cover featuring Thich Quang Duc, 1992.

Outside of Howard Beale from the classic film Network, nothing in the popular culture’s consciousness conveys “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” like the photo shown here, depicting Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc setting himself on fire to protest his government’s oppression of his religion.

So it’s fitting that Rage Against the Machine, a band whose music embodied large-scale protest — on the corporation’s dime, much like Howard Beale! — would employ the image for its eponymous debut. Rage weren’t Buddhists, but they knew that this photograph might make their already-long band name worth at least a thousand words.

In fact, the image turns out to be worthy of a $40,000 grant. After the jump, via Bates College: the story of Thich Quang Duc, and of Trian Nguyen, the Bates professor who hopes to more fully discover the monk whose 1963 self-immolation was not only one of the defining acts of the Vietnam War years, but one of the most significant images of the modern age.

(more…)

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.”

…they just keep coming in. Here are just some of the latest for your dubious pleasure.

Of course there’s the near-obligatory weed reference, this one on a t-shirt, via herspiral: “Here’s something we found online…yikes…”

…and another bit of faux-dharmic financial marketing, via reader Michael D:

“I love your site, and so I have a ‘Dharma-Burger’ I just found for you. Their cringe-worthy commercial came on TV yesterday, and so I looked up their site– pretty interesting way to market this!”

Other readers also sent in word of Zendough’s existence. Arielle K, for her part, describes Zendough as:

…More Dharma Burger in one place than I have ever seen:

“By offering you insight and wisdom about your credit reports and score, debt standing, and identity theft risk, the path to achieve your goals and master your finances will be smoother…  gain wisdom and confidence and proactively manage your finances… zendough.com can …help you achieve financial peace of mind. …Learn more about taking the first steps down the path to financial enlightenment at www.achievezendough.com“

Reader Jim B wrote of Zendough: “I actually had to look twice to make sure it wasn’t a parody — sadly, I think it’s real.”

…But reader Guttorm G writes with some darker stuff:

“Thanks for your wonderful site. Of course I’ve heard of socially engaged Buddhism, but it’s normally on the activists’ side. The Copenhagen police, known for their brutality, used this uniform when imprisoning activists during the climate cop15.”

[Though clearly not Buddhist, the emblem here does resemble the Wheel of Dharma.]

Guttorm goes on to write: “I was [recently] studying in Kyoto and I went to one of the 5 main Rinzai Zen temples (as well as a world heritage site), Tenryu-Ji. I’m attaching a picture of what I saw. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry, but its certainly not what i expected”:

Laugh or cry? I don’t know. But if, somehow, Tenryu-Ji is seeing at least a little bit of money from this, that would help. …Nescafe ads at Zen temples — a sign of something terrible, or just a sign of the times?

More to come, and thanks.