As long as I can remember, I have felt a distance from the culture that has surrounded me. Try as I might, I could never reconcile the disparity between what I wanted out of my life and what was expected of me by my community in Lebanon, and around the Arab world at large. Having grown up spending time in many different locales across the Middle East—from Beirut to Baku to Amman and beyond—I had seen and experienced a pretty comprehensive overview of the wider area’s culture and mores. And yet, I still could never find a strong connection with my heritage and its spiritual and cultural aspirations. In an era of rapid Westernization under the guise of modernization, I couldn’t identify with the traditions being passed down and presented to me from Arab and Western sides alike.

In Lebanon, this can be hard. It’s expected of me—as it is expected of many of my peers—that I side with the talking points laid out by my community’s designated leaders. Among the country’s Christian communities—which includes my own family’s Greek Orthodox sect, which tends to lean left-wing, and the Maronite Catholics, who make up the overwhelming majority of Christians in Lebanon and tend to lean more right-wing—even those who are not supporters of American foreign policy have to constantly reaffirm their allegiance to the sovereignty of the Lebanese state and the wider Arab community as a whole. And yet, it’s become impossible for me to ignore the prejudices intrinsically intertwined within Lebanon’s sociopolitical and cultural stances. Racial and religious minorities, as well as members of the LGBTQIA+ community, are regularly demonized for no other reason than to play on fears and bigoted views passed down as traditions. It’s not uncommon to see families trying to break up relationships, and sometimes even friendships, over sectarian differences. 

In a sense, we’ve been preparing for Buddhism our entire lives. 

It’s also not uncommon now for those growing up in Lebanon to seek out alternative paths to those that have been laid out for them, ones that do not indulge in the cynical excesses of the West or the cyclical blunders of the region. Considering the region’s scarce interaction with East Asia in the past, it seems strange that Lebanese youth would look toward it for guidance when the Middle East is considered the center of the world’s major monotheistic institutions. However, the significant emphasis placed on our spirituality makes it an essential component of our well-being, and so, in a sense, we’ve been preparing for Buddhism our entire lives. 

Like many Middle Eastern and Western seekers of my generation, tenets of Eastern philosophy and spirituality first came onto my radar through the more inspired storytelling of the fantasy and science fiction genres, from children’s entertainment like Avatar: The Last Airbender to popular film franchises like Star Wars. But, along with the rise in popularity of mindfulness, meditation, yoga, and martial arts as a form of balance and self-care, it was the global otaku community’s direct exposure to the manga and anime of the time—with franchises such as One Piece and Dragon Ball—that really encouraged those of us in university who were intrigued by Eastern cultures to explore the religions that inspired it all. 

In particular, there was something so universal about Dragon Ball that connected with Arab youth, torn between a local tradition that no longer represented their values and the push of Westernization that demanded they embrace modernization. Set in a fictional world based on Asia, the world of Dragon Ball took inspiration from many different cultures from across the continent, including elements from Japan, China, South Asia, Central Asia, the Arab world, and Indonesia, all through a distinctly Buddhist milieu. Artist and creator Akira Toriyama even initially modeled Dragon Ball after a combination of Journey to the West—a 16th-century Chinese text read as an extended Buddhist allegory—and the Nanso Satomi Hakkenden—a Japanese epic of gesaku literature following the adventures and mishaps of eight warriors from Kanto on a quest to collect eight Buddhist prayer beads—which Toriyama adapted into the collecting of the seven titular dragon balls. It is precisely this cultural bridgemaking and world-building that set Dragon Ball apart from its competitors. 

While other anime juggernauts, like the hugely popular Pokémon, Digimon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! franchises, had wider viewerships in the West, they did not offer as much insofar as a distinctively pan-Asian narrative. It’s no surprise that the first animated adaptation of Dragon Ball, which covered roughly the first half of the manga where its cultural and literary inspirations were its primary focus, was more popular in the Arab world than in the West, where its fighting-oriented sequel Dragon Ball Z blossomed, kicking off the massive anime boom of the early aughts. Not only was Dragon Ball integral in the socioethical development of a generation of children from all over the Arab world, its palpable influence on the shonen anime and manga of the aughts—franchises like Naruto and Bleach, which were all the rage in the Middle East at the time—meant that its distinct philosophy was even felt by fans who had never even bothered to watch the original Dragon Ball to begin with.

Along with the renewed interest in Journey to the West and the Nanso Satomi Hakkenden, Toriyama’s innovative storytelling also inspired a new culture and generation to seek out other canonical East Asian philosophical texts. Classics such as the Tao Te Ching and The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch were passed to eager university students searching for knowledge that appealed to the distinct sensibilities developed in a globalized world. Our elders—who were both hostile to and envious of the West—feigned immediate repulsion to our burgeoning interests in the cultures of East Asia and its way of life. Yet, to us, it offered something new, something different from the paths that Arabization and Westernization had forced upon us. 

Inspired by the secular Buddhist movement that was popular in the local alternative scene, it is here that I started to explore different texts revered by the Soto Zen School, in which much of secular Buddhist philosophy was rooted. Other than its palpable presence in Japanese media—which I had grown to cherish—what drew me to Soto Zen was its historical ties to the proletariat (to the extent that it used to be referred to derogatorily as “farmer Zen”) and its dispelling of the ritual and dogmatism that alienated many from more local religions. Considering my profound discomfort with the polarized mentality of my peers, I found comfort in the concept of nonattachment, in particular, which is a central principle of Zen Buddhism. A technical Chan term for nonattachment is “wú niàn” (i.e., “nothought”), which can be conceived of as an “unstained” state. Nonattachment is thus a form of not identifying with one’s thoughts—a separation to avoid further harm from them. For it is our attachment to the transient world around us, of which we, as luminous minds, have no control, that provokes passionate emotions such as fear or anger that lead to our existential suffering. In the words of Lao Tzu, as written in the Tao Te Ching, this is best exemplified in the passage:

“Fame or Self: Which matters more? 
Self or Wealth: Which is more precious? 
Gain or Loss: Which is more painful? 
He who is attached to things will suffer much. 
He who saves will suffer heavy loss. 
A contented man is rarely disappointed. 
He who knows when to stop does not find himself in trouble. 
He will stay forever safe.”

Even when removed from the drama that comes with political participation, our social lives are intrinsically tied to such frivolous pursuits. It is this attachment that is at the heart of every Lebanese crisis. It is the determinant of our social standing. Your community will judge you for having none of it; they will spur you on to pursue them as a means and end. And so, we are forced to pursue such frivolities, accumulating worthless status symbols—always spending, always saving, always suffering, never stopping—until an inevitable burnout. In a climate as overwhelming as the Middle East, nonattachment is not merely a means of psychological fulfillment but also a coping mechanism necessary for survival. 

Years have passed since I was first introduced to Zen in the alternative scene. Friends I made there have all gone their separate ways and now lead lives in the high-stress corporate hustles they were once loath to imagine themselves in. Giving in to their material attachments, I see them suffering the very personal crises they looked down upon back in university when they were willing to abandon their everyday concerns and live in the moment. I now see the wisdom of the Platform Sutra when Huineng insists that nonattachment is the only way to silence the noise that threatens to tear you down and turn you into that which you were told to hate and fear: 

“Therefore, nothought is established as a doctrine. Because man in his delusion has thoughts in relation to his environment, heterodox ideas stemming from these thoughts arise, and passions and false views are produced from them.” 

Though nonattachment is one path to leading a fulfilling life in the Middle East, it does not come so easily. In a culture as materialistic as Lebanon’s, it’s hard to forgo material comforts, let alone the immaterial comforts like honoring one’s ancestors, duty to one’s nation, and loyalty to a community’s cause. Regional political and economic spheres are so tied to sociocultural life that you can be psychologically dragged back into the commotions of Lebanese life without realizing that no one is forcing it on you and that, within your means, is a choice on how to proceed forward. As Huineng clarifies, it’s as simple as tuning it all out, one thought at a time:

“Successive thoughts do not stop; prior thoughts, present thoughts, and future thoughts follow one after the other without cessation. If one instant of thought is cut off, the dharma body separates from the physical body, and in the midst of successive thoughts, there will be no place for attachment to anything. If one instant of thought clings, then successive thoughts cling; this is known as being fettered. If, in all things, successive thoughts do not cling, then you are unfettered. Therefore, nonabiding is made the basis.”

It may seem difficult at first, impossible even. However, as conflicts drag on in the Middle East with no end in sight, the tolls on us, psychologically and physically, mean that our need to embrace nonattachment is made cogent and conclusive. As soon as I came to terms with this truth, I was finally able to accept it as a working theory. Away from the senseless passions and pains that have brought me nothing but strife, I finally found solace in the state of nonattachment. Only once we’ve firmly and resolutely “let go”—from accumulating material wealth, from participating in religious dogma, from seeing my fellow man as “the other”— can we finally lead the life we’ve always wanted for ourselves. In a sense, through embracing nonattachment and living its truth—as the Platform Sutra puts it—we can truly be reborn and start anew.

The post ‘Dragon Ball’ to Soto Zen appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As an active Buddhist, a former video producer, and a lifelong pop culture junkie, it’s impossible for me to not see Buddhist themes and teachings in everything I watch. In some cases, it’s overwhelming, like in Everything Everywhere All at Once, which explored emptiness for two and a half hours, but in most cases, it’s a bit more subtle, like in Barbie.

(Warning: mild spoilers ahead, but none you can’t find anywhere else on the internet.)

Barbie is deliciously pink. A psychedelic, campy satire that at times is bittersweet with its commentary on gender equality and the patriarchy, it is radical to some, very funny to others, and thought-provoking for all. Director Greta Gerwig has managed to paint a broad enough pink landscape to allow for much interpretation—a hallmark of all great film and art. 

What has struck me most about the film is its deeper explorations of female suffering. The journey of Stereotypical Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, is in many ways akin to the historical Buddha’s journey toward enlightenment. The movie starts with Barbie living in an almost picture-perfect Barbieland. Her morning routine is effortless. She has no cellulite. She is living in an abundance of pink. 

It is not until she leaves Barbieland that she discovers how tragically imperfect the world actually is—how much suffering there is, specifically for women. During the most perfect disco-dancing party, Stereotypical Barbie asks, “Do you ever think about dying?” to both her and her other Barbie and Ken friends’ shock. 

We see a similar arc in the story of Siddhartha Gautama. As a wealthy prince, Gautama’s life is picture-perfect. He has unlimited resources, a family, and what most people during that time—or any time—could want. But something beyond his understanding called him to explore the “real world.” When he went beyond the castle walls, he quickly met the full spectrum of humanity that he hadn’t been privy to up until that point: sickness, old age, and death. 

As I watched Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling roller-blade down Santa Monica Pier in highlighter-yellow roller blades, searching for answers, I started to wonder if Gerwig was laying out much more than what appeared on the pink surface. Was this movie actually an existential fever dream dressed in pink and plastic?

In Barbie, once Stereotypical Barbie and Ken enter the “real world” for the first time, they quickly see and encounter suffering as did Gautama. But this suffering comes in different forms now. We see how Stereotypical Barbie suffers quickly and deeply much more than Ken as she gets sexually harassed by construction workers and feels suffering perhaps for the first time. On a quest to find her “owner,” she mistakes a teenager for her playmate, and instead of getting the warm welcome she was expecting, she instead gets reamed out for creating unmanageable expectations for women everywhere. 

The heart of the movie, somewhat hidden amidst all the clever farce, comes when Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie and a co-founder of Mattel, played by Rhea Perlman, explains to Stereotypical Barbie that the world is full of suffering, that this is part of being human. Of course, my little Buddhist heart couldn’t help but remember the first of the four noble truths—that suffering exists, plain and simple. As humans, we cannot escape it; it is part of our existence. But it’s our job to look deeply and transform it into something better than how we found it.

The film then goes on to explore the idea of perfection, in both a capitalist and feminist way, and perhaps unbeknownst to Gerwig, taps into one of the great teachings: buddhanature. Stereotypical Barbie and her other Barbie friends start embodying imposter syndrome, cultivating a narrative that they are simply enough. But Ruth reminds Barbie, while they float in white space (a dramatic reprieve from all the glorious pink), that Barbie has always been perfect, that she was, in fact, made perfect. This seemingly simple statement—that our most authentic, natural selves are perfect in a world made of plastic—isn’t just a brilliant move here, but a profound one.

The teachings continue to reveal themselves as Ken begins his existential crisis after trying to turn Barbieland into a patriarchy and confronting his attachment to his own identity. The attachment to self and our own egos—when we fail to grasp that, as Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh says, we all inter-are—is, of course, one of the many ways suffering is born. Ken breaks down, cries, and, much as Barbie does, begins to feel the full spectrum of emotions that come with living a life that is filled with suffering. After trying to bury his tears, he then goes into a dance number about his manhood, and, truly, his identity. 

Ken screams at the top of his lungs and chiseled chest, asking Barbie who he is if he isn’t Ken? He goes through the many different kinds of Kens, trying to find more meaning in who he is. In response, Barbie practices compassion by sharing with him that he is “just Ken.” It isn’t until he lets go of this deep attachment of self that he realizes he is good enough, simply as is—in his buddhanature—and sports a tie-dyed sweatshirt that says, “I’M KENOUGH.” 

For me, the most poignant moment in the film is when Ruth invites Barbie to feel. And feel she does, opening herself up to life, with all of its flaws and imperfections, joys and sorrows. Feeling might be painful, but in the end, she would rather feel than not. Despite the treacherous journey we have as not just humans but as women in a world that has taken away our autonomy, which forces us into a box and shackles us with expectations and twisty-ties, Barbie realizes that this plight we call humanity is still worth it.

As a feminist and a Buddhist, I found this realization to be the most striking part of this summer blockbuster. Stereotypical Barbie chose the most complex, challenging, oppressive, and beautiful experience of all—being human.

The post What ‘Barbie’ Teaches Us About Suffering appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The wind is picking up and the snow is coming down harder. Visibility has reduced; I can only see a few hundred feet in front of me. My hypothermia risk has increased, my energy has dipped, and I’m getting thirsty and hungry. I hear wolves howling in the distance. I realize that I must get back to my cabin before the blizzard hits, or I will die. 

I am playing The Long Dark, a survival video game with the tagline “Welcome to the quiet apocalypse.” Set in the northern Canadian wilderness on the fictional Great Bear Island, players have to navigate a frozen world without electricity in the aftermath of a geomagnetic disaster. Players can travel from region to region to find loot, but eventually, all supplies will be depleted, and you will have to survive on your wits and skills. In the game’s survival mode, you are the only person on the fifty-square-kilometer island. You can choose one of four difficulty levels—pilgrim, voyager, stalker, or interloper—or choose a custom mode and set dozens of parameters to make it as easy or as difficult as you want to survive in the frigid Canadian north. 

Playing in pilgrim mode, I awakened on Great Bear Island in the snow-covered expanse of mountainous northern Canada with little food or clothing. I scoured the empty houses to find outdated canned food, old granola bars, and some dusty old cans of soup that had been left behind when the last people departed. As I checked cupboards and cabinets, I found clothes—some in good condition and some very old, but enough to keep me warm—and a few basic tools—a hatchet, a hacksaw, and a hunting knife. My new equipment allowed me to heat up canned food, cook the meat and fish that I scavenged, and melt snow to have water to drink. As I explored the island’s various regions, I discovered more resources, as well as workbenches to repair tools and craft items to aid survival. Over time, my skills increased, and I learned how to use my resources more efficiently. But death was always right around the corner.

Vegans don’t survive on Great Bear Island; there’s no plant-based diet in sub-zero temperatures. As a Zen practitioner, I don’t want to kill even virtual animals, but that’s the only way to survive. The first time I used a rifle to kill a virtual deer, which had been peacefully grazing around Mystery Lake, I felt like I had torn apart the natural landscape. Sure, my character needed food to survive, but why was my life more important than the deer’s? 

That deer sustained me for several days, and if I were to take down a bear, I could store the meat in the snow and survive off that for weeks. Still, I didn’t want to kill such majestic animals. Between catching fish or rabbits, I learned that fishing is the easiest and least violent way of acquiring food. While rabbits are abundant on Great Bear Island, you either have to catch them in snares or first stun them with stones and then snap their necks; I couldn’t use my virtual hands to kill bunnies. I chose to rely on snares for hunting. At least this way, when I collected them, they were already dead. 

Impermanence is built into the game. Everything you possess wears out over time. Your clothes, your tools, your food—everything eventually goes bad. You have to repair your clothes and your shoes, and, in order to perform the repairs, you need to find items like sewing kits, bits of cloth, and pieces of leather. You can repair your hacksaw with scrap metal, and if you find a whetstone, you can use it to sharpen your hatchet and knife sharp, but it, too, will wear out. Zen teaches us that everything is impermanent, and I am always aware when playing The Long Dark that a time will come—if I manage to survive long enough—when nothing other than the bare essentials will remain. 

The Zen expression “chop wood, carry water” describes what you have to do in The Long Dark. You chop wood to keep warm, cook food, boil water, and carry that water around as you travel. Every moment playing The Long Dark is the present moment. There’s no time to worry about what’s going to happen in a week or to dwell on past mistakes; all you can think of is how to stay alive. That’s the only goal of the game: to stay alive. In survival mode, there’s no golden ring or trophy. There’s only the satisfaction of making it through yet another day, discovering that you have not transitioned into “the long dark,” death. 

The only humans you see in survival mode are frozen corpses. They remind you that your life is precious, that it won’t take much to lose it, and that you better stock up on wood, catch some fish, and prepare for the next blizzard. 

The Long Dark is engrossing, as you feel the stress of your character when the temperature goes down and hunger sets in, and you don’t know if you’ll make it back to your base before the blizzard hits. Unlike many other video games, The Long Dark’s survival mode has permadeath: when you die, you must start over from the beginning. There is no rebirth; you can’t go back to a previous save and have a do-over. As Dogen said in Shoji, a chapter of his Shobogenzo, “There is nothing such as birth and death to be avoided; there is nothing such as nirvana to be sought. Only when you realize this are you free from birth and death.” 

With this in mind, you can play The Long Dark and be in the moment, realizing that this is the only moment that you have, that the past is gone, and that the future is not yet here. Death will come, and it will be all right. But for now, you can marvel at the beautiful landscapes and the silence of the wilderness, and keep on chopping wood and carrying water. 

The post Chop Wood, Carry Water appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Here at Tricycle, we read a lot of Buddhist books, keeping our eyes peeled for any titles that may interest our readers. But like anyone with a Netflix (or Hulu, or HBO Max, or Disney+) subscription, we also end up watching a lot of shows. Although references to Buddhism in Western TV and film are typically scant or nonexistent, we still often find ourselves drawing connections to Buddhist wisdom. So we assembled a list of recently watched shows or films that called Buddhist themes or principles to mind—some more directly than others. Take them as suggestions the next time you’re struggling to find something to watch.

***

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021)
Directed by Dean Fleischer Camp

You may or may not be familiar with Marcel, the anthropomorphic one-inch-tall shell outfitted with a singly googly eye and pair of pink sneakers, who first captivated viewers in 2010 through a series of short YouTube videos that garnered millions of views. Now, he’s the star of the recently released A24 film Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, which premiered in festivals in 2021 before its wide release in July of 2022. The stop-motion-animated film is shot as a mockumentary, with director Dean Fleischer Camp playing a fictionalized version of himself as a recent divorcee and documentary filmmaker who moves into an Airbnb and discovers that he’s not its only resident. Camp stumbles upon Marcel (voiced by actress and comedian Jenny Slate) and his grandmother, Nana Connie, two tiny shell creatures who have lived unnoticed in the house for generations. 

While the movie is both sweet and laugh-out-loud funny, it doesn’t shy away from heavier themes of loss and death. Marcel reveals to Camp that his community of shells used to be much larger, but due to an unexplained tragedy, they have been missing for years. This loss of community drives the plot of the film as Camp and Marcel set out to find the shell’s family with the help of the internet. I could go on about how the film explores sensationalism in the digital era, astutely highlighting the difference between an audience and a community, but that’s not what touched me the most about Marcel’s story. Rather, it’s how Marcel deeply understands and appreciates his place in the world, even as a tiny, one-inch mollusk. In the film’s final moments, Marcel shows us one of his favorite spots in the house, a quiet windowsill where the breeze flutters in. As he stands there, he notes how he can hear the wind blowing through his shell, showing him that he’s a small but indispensable part of the world’s beauty. “I like the way I sound in the world,” he whispers. 

Though it may come across as a children’s film, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On tempers its sweetness with deep wisdom. Marcel bestows upon audiences the importance of community, love for the little things, and quiet reflection on our interdependence. 

—Amanda Lim Patton

How to Change Your Mind (2022)
Directed by Alison Ellwood and Lucy Walker, starring Michael Pollan

How to Change Your Mind is a four-part Netflix documentary series based on Michael Pollan’s 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. In the show, as in the book, Pollan aims to destigmatize psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and MDMA, and investigates how they might be used to understand the mind and treat health conditions like depression and anxiety. Many of the show’s interviewees describe their experience with psychedelics as deeply healing and spiritual. In the first episode on LSD, one researcher named James Fadiman explains how his first trip awakened him to the reality of our interdependence. “I took LSD and that was the day that my life was transformed, where I realized that Jim Fadiman, for all of his benefits and flaws, was a subset of a larger being. And that larger being was connected to all other beings. In other words, a classical mythical experience of awareness of the unity and the interweaving of all things.” 

Though Pollan isn’t Buddhist himself, he says that his personal experiences with these drugs led him to a regular meditation practice, and his research explores many Buddhist themes, including questioning consciousness, the ego, and the self.

—Alison Spiegel and Amanda Lim Patton

The Midnight Gospel (2020)
Created by Pendleton Ward and Duncan Trussell

The Midnight Gospel is not a casual watch. Or, I suppose it could be, but then you’d either be missing out on all the absurd details of its animation or the nuances of the philosophical conversations. Granted, it’s often difficult to focus on both at the same time. Co-created by Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward and comedian Duncan Trussell, The Midnight Gospel is an animated Netflix series that follows the cosmic adventures of a spacecaster (video podcaster in space) named Clancy Gilroy. In each episode, Gilroy (voiced by Trussell) travels to a new planet and interviews one of its inhabitants for his spacecast, often asking guests about their life philosophies as the pair navigate an impending apocalyptic disaster. 

Uniquely, each episode’s spacecast interview is adapted from earlier episodes of Trussell’s own podcast, The Duncan Trussell Family Hour. A Tibetan Buddhist himself, Trussell’s selected guests within The Midnight Gospel include an array of spiritual teachers, such as Tibetan teacher David Nichtern, Vipassana teacher Trudy Goodman, and the late American spiritual leader Ram Dass. My favorite episode of the series is the last one, in which Gilroy interviews his mother, voiced by retired psychologist and Trussell’s late mother Deneen Fendig. The two embark on an emotional journey through the cycle of birth, life, and death, which is made more acute given that Fendig had late-stage breast cancer at the time of the interview. Gilroy asks his mother what advice she would give to people who are dealing with heartbreak around death. She replies, “I would tell them to cry when they need to cry. And to turn toward this thing that’s called death… Even if you’re afraid to turn toward it, turn toward it. It won’t hurt you. And see what it has to teach you. It’s a tremendous teacher, free of charge.” As I said, the show is not a casual watch. But it’s definitely worth watching. 

—Amanda Lim Patton

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba (2019-)
Produced by Ufotable

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is a thrilling, action-packed anime about—you guessed it—slaying dangerous demons. Despite the gore, the show manages to be lighthearted and funny. This combination may be the reason it’s one of the most popular anime series running right now. In fact, the sequel film Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (2020) is now the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time. 

When a demon attacks a rural family of charcoal makers, only two survive: Tanjiro and his little sister, Nezuko, who is tragically turned into a demon. To avenge his family and find a way to transform his sister back into a human, Tanjiro joins the Demon Slayer Corps, a group of elite swordsmen dedicated to protecting humans from their hungry demon adversaries. 

Over the course of the series, both of the siblings develop a kind of bodhicitta—a strong desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to deal with their demons (both internal and external) skillfully. Motivated by her own willpower and love for her brother, Nezuko learns to control her demon impulse to kill humans and instead fights alongside Tanjiro as a demon slayer. By envisioning all of humanity as her close family, she’s able to use her own demonic powers to protect others. And, unlike his demon slayer comrades, Tanjiro develops compassion for even the most despicable, terrifying demons and maintains a gentle spaciousness in his heart amidst immense loss. Many of the demons that Tanjiro fights are moved by his kindness and are able to recall their “past lives” as humans—along with their trauma or conditions that led them to become a demon. Thanks to Tanjiro’s compassion for all beings, the demons are able to discover a sense of peace in their final moments.

—Aidan Speckhard

Bouddhisme, La Loi du Silence (or Buddhism: The Unspeakable Truth) (2022)
Directed by Elodie Emery and Wandrille Lanos

On September 13, Arte, a European public service TV network, released a documentary called Bouddhisme, La Loi du Silence (or Buddhism: The Unspeakable Truth), made by filmmakers Elodie Emery and Wandrille Lanos. The film is currently available to watch in France until December 11, 2022, and the Tricycle editorial staff recently watched the film together. La Loi du Silence spotlights patterns of abuse by Tibetan Buddhist teachers around the world, as well as the insufficient condemnation of such abuse by leaders like the Dalai Lama. In the process, the film raises many questions: How do teachers and communities distort Buddhist teachings in harmful ways? Who is responsible for teacher-student abuse or systemic abuse within a community? How has the Dalai Lama’s dual role as a political and spiritual leader compromised his ability to call out abuse and his effectiveness in stopping it? Why were Westerners drawn to Buddhism in the first place, and what led some to leave their children under the care of leaders like Robert Spatz, who is a central figure in the documentary? How can senior teachers and members of Buddhist communities expose, speak out against, and work to prevent this kind of abuse from occurring in the future? Although the documentary may introduce “unspeakable truths” to new audiences who were not previously familiar with the assault and manipulation that has occurred within some Buddhist groups, ultimately the film leaves many questions unanswered. 

—Alison Spiegel

The post What We’re Watching appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The Lord of the Rings as a modern Buddhist myth? Not very plausible on the face of it, given that it’s derived largely from the Nordic and Germanic sagas. Moreover, the story is built on an uncompromising and quite un-Buddhist dualism between good and evil, and apparent endorsement of violence against evil. It’s clear that the only good orc is a dead orc. 

Nevertheless, The Lord of the Rings resonates with Buddhist concerns and perspectives because it is about a special kind of quest. Frodo leaves home not to slay a dragon or win a chest of jewels, but to let go of something. He renounces the Ring, not for any selfish purpose, not even to gain enlightenment, yet it nevertheless transforms him profoundly. His journey implies something important about the Buddhist path today.

An Engaged Quest

Frodo does not go on his adventures because he wants to go. He embarks on the quest because it cannot be evaded. The Ring must be destroyed and he is the best one to carry it. There is nothing he hopes to gain from the journey. By the end, he and [his fellow hobbit] Sam expect to be destroyed soon after the Ring is cast into the fire, which nearly happens. The pair’s total renunciation is a powerful metaphor. They let go of all personal ambition, although not the ambition to do what is necessary to help the world.

Frodo’s quest is not an attempt to transcend Middle-earth and attain some higher reality. He is simply responding to its needs, which, because of historical circumstances (the growing power of Sauron) have become critical—just like the needs of our beleaguered earth today. The larger world has begun to impinge on Frodo’s Shire. If he were to decline the task and hide at home, he would not escape the impending dangers. (When we consider the ecological and social crises that have begun to impinge on our own world, is our situation today any different?)

You may ask, is Frodo’s journey a spiritual quest, or a struggle to help the world? In The Lord of the Rings, they are the same thing. Frodo realizes—makes real—his own nonduality with the world by doing everything he can to help it. And by doing so, Frodo transforms himself. He becomes selfless. Frodo does not change because he destroys the Ring. He changes because of his determined efforts to destroy the Ring. His early adventures on the road to Rivendell challenge and toughen him, giving him courage to be the Ringbearer. His strength of will and heart grows from these encounters, which teach him initiative, perseverance, and eventually self-reliance. 

The Karma of the Rings

In the Tibetan mandala, known as the Wheel of Life, the six realms of samsara are depicted within a circle. At its core are a cock, a snake, and a pig, symbolizing the three poisons of greed, ill will, and delusion, which are the source of all suffering. Curling around them are two paths: on one side, the white upward path of virtue and spiritual development, on the other, the dark downward path of evil and its painful consequences. The Lord of the Rings illustrates both alternatives in the moral progress and deserved rewards of Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, and Gandalf, and in the utter failure and eventual destruction of Sauron, Gollum, Saruman, and Wormtongue.

Middle-earth is structured karmically: good intentions lead to good results, while evil intentions are self-defeating. This Buddhist-like principle of moral causation is one of the keys to the plot, recurring again and again.

It is easy enough to see how good intentions are rewarded, yet the unsuccessful consequences of bad intentions are just as important. The best example is Gollum. He does not want to help Frodo and Sam. He wants to get his hands on the Ring, and to gain the opportunity to do this, he must help them time and again. When they are lost he leads them to Mordor. When they become stuck, he shows them a mountain path. And at the end, when an exhausted Frodo is no longer able to relinquish the Ring, Gollum appears once more to bite off Frodo’s finger—and fall into the fiery pit, to be destroyed along with the Ring. 

In Middle-earth, this karmic law seems to work as inexorably as gravity, but, as we know all too well, karma does not work so neatly in our world. Evil often seems to succeed, at least in the short run; goodness has a harder time prevailing. This reminds us that karma should not be understood as some inevitable calculus of moral cause and effect because it is not primarily a teaching about how to control what the world does to us. It is about our own spiritual development: how our lives are transformed by transforming our motivations.

That was one of the Buddha’s great insights: karma is not something I have, it is what I am, and what I am changes according to what I choose to do. This is implied by the Buddhist emphasis on non-self. My sense of self is a product of habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Just as my body is composed of the food I eat, so is my character constructed by my conscious choices. People are “punished” or “rewarded” not for what they have done but for what they have become, and what we intentionally do is what makes us what we are. To become a different kind of person is to experience the world in a different way. When your mind changes, the world changes. And when you respond differently to the world, the world usually responds differently to you.

Consistent with this view of karma, the traditional “six realms” of samsara do not need to be distinct worlds or planes of existence through which we transmigrate after death, according to our karma. They can also be the different ways we experience this world as our character, and therefore our attitude toward the world, changes. 

⧫

Adapted from The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons © 2004 David R. Loy and Linda Goodhew, The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons. Reprinted by arrangement with Wisdom Publications, Inc., wisdompubs.org

The post The Dharma of the Rings appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

There’s a moment in Indian Matchmaking—the hit Netflix reality show that centers on a Mumbai-based matchmaker who works with clients in both the United States and India—that led many Buddhist viewers to take notice.

For those who have yet to dive into the buzzy docuseries, the heart of Indian Matchmaking is Sima Taparia, the 50-something matchmaker who is devoted to finding the perfect rishta (match) for her clients. In episode three, viewers learn Sima’s dedication even extends to meditating over how best to help them find love. The camera pans to Sima as she sits at her personal prayer area and recites “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo,” which is the title of the Lotus Sutra and the bedrock chant for followers of the Nichiren Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai International (SGI) worldwide.

In many ways, the embrace of SGI by Sima is reflective of the growth of the organization in India, especially among the country’s thriving professional class. While SGI’s Indian affiliate Bharat Soka Gakkai only had 1,000 members when it opened 1992, membership has skyrocketed in the decades since. The group now claims to  have over 200,000 members in over 300 cities and towns across India. 

Much of that growth can be attributed to SGI’s boom in popularity at the beginning of the millennium. Soka Gakkai “is definitely Japan’s most successful religious export,” Levi McLaughlin, an expert on Soka Gakkai and a professor of religion and philosophy at North Carolina State University, told Tricycle. “And that is really saying something if you think about Zen, for example.”

As McLaughlin watched Sima meditate on the show, he was struck by several aspects of her practice, particularly the fact that she displayed an Indian statue of the Buddha alongside statues of Hindu deities like Shiva. (In keeping with Soka Gakkai tradition, the gohonzon, or mandala depicting the daimoku, was not photographed and instead appeared to be just off camera). “If you were to set up the calligraphic object of worship alongside the Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu in Japan, people there would be quite shocked,” he said, adding that Nichiren Buddhists in India are known for blending local cultures with Buddhist principles.

Sima’s adoption of SGI practice also reflects the faith’s growing popularity in India, particularly among that nation’s burgeoning population of upper-middle-class professionals. “This is a very aspirational group of people, and Soka Gakkai appeals to the aspirational,” said McLaughlin. “One of the principles of Soka Gakkai is human revolution and the belief that through dedication to the practice one can achieve anything one desires to achieve.” Whereas Soka Gakkai is known as a religion of the poor in Japan—a history that dates back to the faith’s growth in the 1950s as Japan struggled to recover from World War II—the average SGI practitioner in India is decidedly economically ambitious. 

For Indian American SGI practitioners, watching Indian Matchmaking and seeing Sima chant the daimoku was particularly poignant. “The show has both its positives and things that I don’t necessarily agree with, but they are all part of our society,” viewer and SGI practitioner Shraddha Wadhwani told Tricycle. Critics of the show note that Indian Matchmaking glosses over how matchmaking can serve to uphold India’s caste system and how the insistence of many families that potential brides be “fair” continues to normalize the rampant colorism many Indians experience.

Despite the criticism, Wadhwani was heartened to see a familiar custom on screen. “I don’t think the concept of matchmaking is foreign to Indians and honestly, any marriage is arranged right?” she remarked. “You usually either meet the person through friends or family.”

Wadhwani was particularly taken by the fact that Sima not only chanted to support her personal goals but also to receive guidance about how best to serve her clients—many of whom had opened up to her about their past relationship struggles and their dreams for the future. “I liked the fact that she used meditation to chant about her clients, that is a very integral part of SGI and Nichiren Buddhism,” noted Wadhwani. “The practice is meant to make us more compassionate and promote the happiness of both self and others.”

Wadhwani also understood how Soka Gakkai could provide much-needed guidance for both a matchmaker and someone going through the process of finding a spouse. Wadhwani now lives in New Jersey, but she first came to Soka Gakkai seven years ago when she was at a turning point in her life while still living in India. “When you chant, you tend to look at things at a deeper level,” said Wadhwani. “There was a phase in my life where things weren’t going well and made me realize some of the things that I needed to work on.”

That introspection is particularly important for those looking to get married, said Wadhwani, who got married herself two years ago at the age of 32. Searching for a spouse “is a high stress thing and the chanting helps you look beyond just finding a partner,” she said. “It prompts you to ask, ‘Why do you want to get married in the first place? What is it that you are seeking?’ That helps you focus on your goals.”

Watching Indian Matchmaking reminded SGI practitioner Meghna Damani of her own experiences as a young bride in 2002. Damani was surprised to discover that Sima also practiced Nichiren Buddhism, a practice that she herself started following after she struggled to adjust after her own marriage. In her debut documentary, Hearts Suspended, Damani detailed the struggles she and many other Indian wives experienced after arriving in the US on spousal visas that prohibited them from working. She was introduced to Soka Gakkai after she briefly separated from her husband and returned to Mumbai to work in advertising.

“My boss practiced Soka Gakkai, so the screensaver on my work computer was the chant,” she recalls. Her boss soon invited her to an SGI meeting. “It was incredible because the chanting itself really started giving me hope and made me start believing in myself,” Damani said. As she continued her practice, her fellow practitioners urged her to rejoin her husband in the US and to seek out the SGI community there.

Connecting with the Soka Gakkai community in New Jersey after she settled back into life in the States “was like finding an anchor,” she said. “It was realizing that home is not a physical place, it is a spiritual place within yourself.”

While Sima’s Buddhist practice may escape mainstream viewers of the show, SGI practitioners may see a hidden message in her commitment to Buddhism.

“As in all matters of the heart, we can get easily swayed. What the practice of Nichiren Buddhism teaches us that we create our own lives and destiny,” Damani explained. “As we transform, we attract the right partners into our lives.” 

The post The Hit Netflix Show <i>Indian Matchmaking</i> Has a Surprising Connection to Buddhism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Water, earth, fire, air. The Buddha taught these four classical elements to his followers as a foundation for mindfulness practice and a reminder of the interconnectedness of all beings. But if you list these four elements to a room of twenty-somethings, you’re more likely to prompt a recitation of the opening sequence of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. 

Avatar first premiered on Nickelodeon in 2005, and was added to Netflix in May—much to the delight of a generation of lifelong fans. The show’s popularity is evidenced by its record-breaking streak on Netflix’s “Top 10” most-watched list. Despite originally being targeted at a younger audience, the Emmy award-winning television series quickly attained cultish popularity among teenagers and adults for its unique blend of whimsy and wisdom. The New Yorker described it—in a review written a decade and a half after Avatar’s release—as “politically resonant” and “emotionally sophisticated.” Drawing inspiration from Buddhism and other Asian religions, Avatar also explores the thorny question of how to act on one’s spirituality and ethical convictions in situations that are not clear-cut. 

 The world of Avatar is one of magic, mysticism, martial arts, and made-up animals. But the youthful antics and flying bison are presented against a troubling backdrop. Set in an Asiatic world split into four nations, the series begins in the midst of an imperialist war launched by the Fire Nation against the nations of the Water Tribe, the Earth Kingdom, and the Air Nomads. Throughout the show, benders from each nation, who can manipulate one of the corresponding elements of water, earth, fire, or air, must decide whether they will use their abilities to fight against, or for, tyrannical forces. The bending styles and traditions of the nations borrow heavily from various Eastern traditions, histories, and religions, with the Air Nation in particular resembling aspects of Tibetan Buddhism. 

The series follows 12-year-old Aang, a peaceful airbender and the next reincarnation of the Avatar, who has the unique ability to control all four elements and is responsible for restoring balance to the world. Aang was brought up by monks in the Southern Air Temple, where all airbenders don robes of saffron orange and yellow, shave their heads, and live a vegetarian lifestyle based on principles of nonviolence. The names of Aang’s mentor, Gyatso, and Aang’s (future) airbender son, Tenzin, are nods to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. 

Like the Dalai Lama, the Avatar is thought to be reincarnated over many lifetimes. As a young child, Aang selected four relics from among thousands of toys, thereby confirming his identity as the reincarnation of the Avatar—a process resembling the one used to identify the Dalai Lama. Years later, upon learning his identity as the Avatar, Aang rejects his immense responsibility to the world and flees the temple. Aang’s struggle to accept his role as the Avatar recalls the debate among Buddhists over the extent to which monastics and practitioners should engage in worldly matters.  

Since the show came to Netflix, many who grew up watching Avatar have nostalgically returned to it and now recognize complex themes of systemic injustice that they didn’t detect as children: the Fire Nation’s fascism and imperialism, the genocide of Aang’s people and his grief around the death of his culture (an apparent allusion to the destruction of the Cultural Revolution), and the Earth Kingdom’s extreme government surveillance and dissent-quelling police force. Just as some Buddhist leaders have been imploring people to challenge their own implicit racial biases and participation in systems of racism, the young Avatar’s efforts to expose abuses of power in the Earth Kingdom’s capital, Ba Sing Se, evoke Buddhism’s four noble truths: one must face the reality of suffering in order to work toward an end of suffering.

One viewer, 24-year-old Maggie Wolfe, told Tricycle that she hoped rewatching Avatar would provide a brief emotional escape from the coronavirus pandemic and America’s systemic racial and economic inequality, but instead, the show felt “painfully relevant.” Wolfe, a New York City resident, was reminded of how even the liberal-leaning city is reckoning with police brutality. She said, “The same problems exist here, because they’re so institutionalized. They exist everywhere.” 

Another viewer, 23-year-old Jenny Lee, felt that Aang’s struggle to choose between violent and nonviolent means to restore balance between the four nations was pertinent to the current moment of civil unrest. “We can all live by the idea of nonviolence and respecting one another and caring for one another,” Lee said, “but at the end of the day, we have to retaliate against oppressive forces”—just as Aang must retaliate against Fire Lord Ozai, the show’s supervillain. Shortly before Aang’s epic battle with the Fire Lord, he connects to his past Avatar lives, hoping they can provide a solution that does not involve killing. Yet, each Avatar, including a past Air Nomad Avatar, urges Aang to stop the Fire Lord at whatever cost. Although Aang ultimately chooses to abstain from taking life in the pursuit of justice, Lee appreciated that the show does not present nonviolence as the only option, nor does it equate nonviolence with passivity. 

Yet the beloved fantasy world of Avatar is not without its flaws. Although Avatar broke new ground in Western childrens’ media by centering Asian identities, the show’s creators, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, both of whom are white, have also drawn criticism for appropriating the Asian cultures that pervade the show’s lore, from the garb of the different nations to the names of its characters. Viewers have mixed opinions on the issue. The New York Times recently praised the series for creating a world “free of whiteness” while also “conscientiously navigating the tricky minefield of cultural appropriation.” Viewer Tsering Say disagreed, suggesting that the show’s “weird mismatch of indigenous and Asian cultures” does a disservice to the cultures they borrow from. Jenny Lee added: “Some of the plot lines and references to Asian histories pull inspiration from too many countries and blend them into one … Certain histories are too complicated to melt down into easy consumable media.”   

While Avatar presents complex political and social issues that are rarely seen in children’s shows, it still follows the common trope that defeating a single evil villain will also defeat all evil forces, noted 23-year-old Tsering Say. Although Say enjoyed rewatching the show as an adult, she wished that it had focused less on individual culpability. Restoring balance in the world of Avatar is contingent on Aang’s defeating Fire Lord Ozai, but in our world, Say pointed out, the notion that simply opposing individual wrongdoing will bring an end to systemic injustice is as far-fetched as bending the elements with a wave of the hand. 

The show is not all doom and gloom, however. Even with the responsibility of saving the world on his shoulders, Aang and his friends make sure they take time to play in rivers, gently tease each other, and rest atop their giant flying bison, Appa. They understand that, as Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Once we love and take care of ourselves, we can be much more helpful to others.” Perhaps most importantly, after months of social distancing amid the COVID-19 pandemic and watching corruption and police brutality go unpunished in the US, Avatar presents a world where justice prevails.

The post A Balanced Pursuit of Justice appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A young man lies on his side, bathing in a sunbeam in a bare Japanese-style room. The window is open, perhaps to let in the fresh breeze on a pleasant day. One bird perches on the sill, then another. In moments, a menagerie of neighborhood fauna surrounds the dozing figure.

Startled, he suddenly awakes.

“N-No, no!” he says.  “I’m not passing into nirvana!”

Shooing away the gathered animals, he shouts: “Butt out, buddy!”

Just then, his slender roommate enters the room, cracking a joke at the napper’s expense.

“Did you say ‘Buddha buddy’?”

Pairing visual homage to classic artistic depictions of the Buddha’s parinirvana with a Japanese pun (hottoke means “scram!” while hotoke means “buddha”), these panels open Nakamura Hikaru’s rollicking comic Saint Young Men, a story about Jesus and the Buddha living as roommates in Tachikawa, a Tokyo suburb. After making it through the hectic turn of the millennium, the two decide to take a vacation from heaven. Their attempts to seamlessly blend into contemporary Japanese society come with decidedly mixed results. The two discover just how hard it is to assimilate—especially when Jesus inadvertently turns the water at the local public bath into wine, or when Buddha starts glowing auspiciously whenever somebody says something virtuous.

Now available in a new English translation from Kodansha Comics, this award-winning manga promises to capture the hearts of a broad international audience. Replete with puns, intertextual allusions, and cute asides in the extradiegetic spaces outside the panels and between chapters, Saint Young Men operates on multiple levels. Superficially, it is a slice-of-life story about two roommates with drastically different personalities. The two make a perfect odd couple: Jesus is a spendthrift while Buddha is parsimonious. Neighborhood girls swoon over Jesus’s resemblance to Johnny Depp, while schoolboys relentlessly flick the urna [auspicious mark] on Buddha’s forehead. Old folks piously present offerings to Buddha, while Jesus’s nasty scars convince local gangsters he is not to be messed with.

At another level, Nakamura’s juxtaposition of saintly figures with quotidian situations makes for outrageous scenarios that both reflect and disrupt common perceptions of religion in a country where it is widely perceived as stuffy and conservative. Even as the comic gently parodies religions, Saint Young Men also offers commentary on contemporary Japanese society, using the experiences of outsiders to reveal the tacit operations of peer pressure and shame, competition and cooperation, harmony and misunderstanding that structure Japanese daily life. Using Japan’s famed cycle of seasonal activities as a temporal backdrop for her tale, Nakamura humanizes two of the most famous religious founders in history while providing an underhanded intervention into commonsense cultural norms.    

Nakamura and her publishers have repeatedly stressed that the manga is not intended to proselytize, but there’s no doubt that many clerics—and professors of religious studies—see Saint Young Men as a potential teaching tool. So what value might it have for teaching and learning about Buddhism?

To answer this question, I reached out to several colleagues who teach courses on Asian religions in Japan, the UK, Canada, and the United States to see how they planned to incorporate Saint Young Men in their classes. While many of these university instructors expressed excitement about the new translation, the general consensus was that Saint Young Men is better for teaching about the ambiguous position of religion in contemporary Japanese society than it is for teaching about Buddhism as such.

Bryan Lowe, an assistant professor of Religion at Princeton University, said that he planned to use the new translation in his course on religions in Japanese culture as part of a closing lesson on how religion is communicated in popular culture in Japan today. “[R]eligion. . .still plays a large role in Japanese social and cultural life, but it does so often outside of traditional religious institutions,” he wrote to me in an email. “While religiosity in Japan has always been diffuse, I’d say that it’s even more so today.…[T]exts like this allow us to see vibrancy outside of mainstream establishments and that there is still a market for religious discourse in contemporary Japan.”  

At first glance Saint Young Men seems to share thematic similarities with the manga hagiographies of religious founders that populate Japanese bookstores and appear in temple souvenir shops. While these texts are not so well-known in the West, these popular introductions to Buddhism pair dramatic plots with adventurous pacing and stimulating imagery. Famous monks like Shinran, Saicho, and Kukai have all gotten the manga treatment, and prolific author Hiro Sachiya (a pseudonym) has produced a voluminous series of manga on buddhas and bodhisattvas such as Miroku (Sanskrit: Maitreya). Like all manga, they are not averse to using humor to transmit religious truths.

Nakamura’s series differs from these manga hagiographies and primers by eschewing didacticism in favor of telling an entertaining story. And although the series certainly rewards readers who are familiar with the life stories of Jesus and the Buddha, one does not need extensive background knowledge about either tradition to have a chuckle or even a hearty laugh.

Take one scene from the recently published first volume of the omnibus edition. Jesus and Buddha decide to attend the fall festival at the local Shinto shrine. After snacking on cotton candy and winning prizes at the the pop-up carnival stalls, the pair join the throng of people shouldering the portable shrine (mikoshi) just so that Jesus can wear a cool-looking overcoat called a happi, a cloth jacket traditionally worn during Japanese mikoshi rituals. (Jesus puns that wearing the happi makes him happy). Over Buddha’s protests that it might be unseemly, they end up wildly jostling the portable shrine and shouting along with the other festival-goers. Later they crack a beer under the shrine gate and watch fireworks. When Jesus and Buddha return home, they discover that the toys they won at the carnival stalls were cheap knock-offs: Buddha’s prize was not a portable game (a Nintendo DS Lite), but a flashlight (DS Light). Jesus got an eraser. Nakamura quips that the two had discovered the “true joy” (daigomi) of a Japanese festival, punning on a technical term for supreme Buddhist truth that can also colloquially mean the “true flavor” or “actual experience” of something. 

As this example suggests, many of Nakamura’s jokes are quite challenging to translate. Her translators compensate by including explanatory notes between chapters and nestling glosses for technical terms in tiny font between panels. While Saint Young Men is hardly didactic, readers of the translation who are unfamiliar with Buddhism learn classic Buddhist terminology while being introduced to a cast of supporting characters such as Ananda, Rahula, and Sujata. Nakamura’s text therefore works as a sort of “expedient means” that naturally guides audiences to greater familiarity with Buddhist doctrine.

Erica Baffelli, Senior Lecturer of Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester, confirmed Dr. Lowe’s interpretation. When she teaches with the comic, she said, she highlights for students how religion is “othered” through the depiction of Jesus and Buddha as foreign guests in Japan, navigating the notoriously labyrinthine rules of social etiquette with more than a few faux pas. Although Dr. Baffelli was a bit skeptical about how useful the comic would be for introducing students to the doctrinal or historical specifics of Buddhism, she sees it as helpful for thinking about relationships between religion and media generally and religion and humor specifically, including discussions of what seems “safe” to parody. She noted, for example, that Saint Young Men offers a lighthearted take on Christianity and Buddhism, but never really addresses Islam, perhaps a pragmatic response to the 2005 Danish cartoon controversy.

Nakamura’s caution extends to the new translation, where some of the translators’ glosses actively reframe narrative content so as not to offend Nakamura’s expanded audience. For example, the concept of the Buddha drinking a beer is not particularly irreverent in Japan, since most Japanese Buddhist priests today eat meat, drink alcohol, and get married. (Priests even operate bars as a form of pastoral care.) Under such circumstances, having the Buddha crack a beer now and then seems perfectly reasonable. But in an interlinear gloss that does not appear in the original text, the translators stress for readers that Buddha’s beer is of course non-alcoholic.

I initially thought that sanitizing the manga in this way was excessively paranoid, but the translators’ caution is perhaps deserved. Daniel Friedrich, a lecturer at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Hosei University, told me that when he introduced a group of visiting Thai students to Saint Young Men as part of a broader lesson on religion and media in Japan, many of the students were offended at what they saw as a sacrilegious portrayal of Buddhism. 

If Nakamura studiously avoids slandering religion, she is also cautious when it comes to depicting religion as too serious. This delicate balancing act avoids another pitfall in Japan, where many laypeople perceive formal religious institutions as overzealous. Matthew McMullen, an associate professor at Nanzan University, suggested to me that it is precisely because Jesus and Buddha aimlessly kick around Tachikawa without having any particular goals in mind that Nakamura’s text avoids appearing pedantic or proselytizing. Nakamura herself draws an explicit distinction between “religion just for fun” and “religion taken too far.” In one scene, Buddha rushes to hide a life-sized Buddhist statue (lovingly nicknamed “Jr.”) from the landlord when she drops by unannounced because he fears it might give her the impression that he is a member of some “freaky religious organization” or “an extreme narcissist.”

For college students in both Japan and North America, generic conventions also affect their interpretations. Daigengna Duoer, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me that many of her students see homoerotic tensions in Nakamura’s plot. For them, Jesus fills the seme (aggressive, top) and Buddha the uke (passive, bottom) roles characteristic of the boys’ love (BL) manga genre, which typically features same-sex relationships between attractive male characters. While Nakamura may not have intended to give this impression, the students nonetheless found it enlightening to read the comic through this lens. 

Ms. Duoer suggested that while Saint Young Men easily reinforces general stereotypes about religions through its depictions of famous founders, it can also disrupt prevailing notions of Buddhism as rigid, ascetic, and stoic. But there is a pitfall in the university classroom, she said, because instructors’ attempts to capture student interest through references to manga and sensational temple outreach programs such as animated music videos and android bodhisattvas can detract from students really engaging with the less scintillating aspects of Buddhist practice. Ultimately, instructors must think about why they want to mobilize such unconventional sources and what lessons these sources really teach.

Saint Young Men is an uproarious read. For those who are familiar with Buddhism, the new translation offers a lighthearted look at a tradition that often has a hard time laughing at itself. But whether the manga counts as a successful expedient means for introducing new audiences to Buddhism remains an open question. 

♦

Jolyon Baraka Thomas authored the foreword to the second omnibus edition of Saint Young Men, released on March 17, 2020.

The post What If Buddha and Jesus Were Roommates? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Growing up, I played with Barbies. 

Barbies who were mermaids, horseback riders, hairdressers, flight attendants, beach fiends. Barbies who brought home gold in the 1998 Winter Olympics. In college I had to confront the dolls’ more controversial reputation. I found out that the Barbies—with their Pollyannaish dispositions, their hard tan plastic mounds for breasts, their legs that squeaked and moved like children’s chopsticks, and their crimped, poofy hair that dwarfed their bodies like Mylar blankets––were crude and problematic symbols that had caused me, without my knowing it, a fair amount of psychic harm. In the following years, new ideas about Barbie flooded out the old ones, and her chirpy, emancipatory claims—“We girls can do anything,” “You can be anything,” “Girls rule”—became specious, and then offensive. 

Barbie and I parted ways, but she tip-toed back into my life recently when I saw a tweet from her official account: Barbie has taken up meditation, she announced, to help her cope with an “increasingly busy, over-connected world.” That’s funny, I thought. I mean, she’s always been really busy—balancing multiple careers, playing housewife to a loyal Ken, and paying off the balance for her pink Corvette, dream home, boat, jet, and rocket ship. But now she has decided to take a break from all that, and just sit. 

Well, not entirely. Breathe with Me Barbie, as she’s called, is part of Mattel’s new “Wellness Collection,” which features Barbies who partake in cucumber face masks, fizzy baths, and mani-pedis and value fitness and sleep. But Breathe with Me Barbie demands the spotlight here, because while Barbie has been pampered before, this is the first time she has ever meditated.  

I immediately wanted to understand what this cross-legged Barbie was all about. Critics were already complaining about how our culture of “wellness” has gone “too far,” and I didn’t want this Barbie to become just another flash point for a sloppy critique of capitalism—perhaps the only aggression she has had to endure more often than having her head twisted off by a younger sibling. 

In their 1999 article “Domesticating Barbie,” anthropologists Marlys Pearson and Paul R. Mullins wrote, “Popular and academic commentators alike routinely lapse into apocryphal observations of a few isolated accessories or a single physical attribute of the doll (e.g., hair, breasts), using this indiscriminate inspection as the tenuous foundation from which they can assail, celebrate, or ridicule Barbie symbolism along any number of agendas.” Pearson and Mullins weren’t feeling sorry for Barbie, but they were trying to sort through Barbie’s closet, stuffed with all her past and present looks, to get to a deeper understanding of how and why Barbie came to be––and avoid reducing her to her parts. 

Likewise, I wasn’t out to defend Barbie and her newfound interest in self-care and mindfulness, but I did want to know whether or not she was an effective meditation teacher for the children who play with her. So I reached out to mindfulness educator and author Susan Kaiser Greenland, who purchased the doll after I alerted her to Breathe with Me Barbie’s existence. 

“Unfortunately, she is both the thesis and the antithesis of a good idea wrapped up in a busty plastic doll,” Susan told me. We video chatted as she moved Barbie around, bending the slender plastic figure into downward dog. Barbie came dressed in “cozy loungewear,” light-blue pajamas printed with little white clouds, and she has “extra flexibility for realistic posing and active play,” meaning she can cross her legs in a sitting meditation posture. (Unfortunately she doesn’t come with a zafu or zabuton.) It was nice to see a liberated Barbie body with flat feet and versatile limbs. “Her chest is appropriately sized, too,” Susan quipped.

“Overall I think the primary message––breathing as a way to get in touch with your emotions and take better care of yourself––is a good one,” she said, adjusting Barbie into an upright half-lotus.

“It’s mainly the interactive, electronic element of the doll that is problematic.” Susan pressed Barbie’s crescent moon shaped necklace.

The purple cloud on Barbie’s chest lit up, tinkling sounds started to play, and Barbie launched into one of her five guided meditations—talking about an imaginary bubble bath and “blowing the biggest bubble” over jingly music. Susan didn’t like this one. 

“This is based on an actual guided practice for kids, which has them imagine blowing a bubble, watching it float away, and wishing it well,” she explained. “The objective is to promote calm. But listen to this.” The jingle culminated in a cartoonish popping sound. 

Susan pressed the necklace four more times, taking me through all five meditations, which sounded less like the instructions on InsightTimer and more like ringtones from the early 2000s. 

It was a little unsettling to hear Barbie be so vulnerable. “Repeat after me: I am strong. I am loved,” Barbie said, as her voice box made scratchy, exaggerated breathing noises. “I’m not a big fan of affirmations,” Susan said. “But if you do like affirmations this one’s not bad.” Hadn’t Barbie always known she was strong and loved?

At the next press of her necklace Barbie shifted into visualization: “Imagine your feelings are fluffy clouds. Now let’s breathe in and out.” 

“This one also feels off to me,” said Susan. “What if our emotions feel more like storm clouds? What if our cloud is black with anger or red with shame, or hard as a rock and not fluffy at all? What do we do then?” Barbie didn’t explain; the meditation tune was over in a matter of seconds. I had a hard time imagining Barbie unsmiling. 

“No connection is made between the clouds we are imagining and the breathing that comes next,” Susan observed. “The same thing happens with the other track that mentions emotions; it asks how we’re feeling but doesn’t connect our feelings with the sounds or visualizations that she encourages.” 

There was also the issue of the light. “Having Barbie’s chest light up in pastel colors like a disco ball is problematic in ways that have nothing to do with meditation.” 

“What do you mean?” I asked. 

“The purple light is engaging. My guess is that’s the point,” Susan suggested. “I think Mattel is hoping that it will engage kids like a TV show or video game. I get why they want to do that, but the way they’re doing it in this doll is difficult to square [with its purported goals]. This flashy quality is carried into the recordings as well.” 

It was slowly becoming clear that Barbie wasn’t very good at this. Despite succeeding at numberless other careers, she was not, judging by my brief encounter with her, an effective meditation teacher. 

“Other than hoping to engage the child, there’s no sense that the creator of the meditations had a clear objective for what experience he or she hoped each of the five guided meditations would support,” Susan added, filling in my thoughts. “These don’t create any kind of spaciousness, connection between feelings, or awareness of what’s happening in your mind.”

When I reached out to Mattel about Breathe with Me Barbie, they sent me a fact sheet about the Wellness Collection. “Barbie recognizes the spike in emotional well-being practices among girls and knows that the focus on personal well-being is a movement that is here to stay,” it read. The fact sheet also revealed that the new Barbies are teaming up with meditation app Headspace, where “girls can access a curated playlist of kid-friendly mindfulness and meditation sessions that complement the emotions available through Breathe with Me Barbie.” It included a list of tips for parents, including eight steps to introduce kids to mindfulness, meditation, gratitude practice, and to “encourage feeling emotions.”

I mentioned the Headspace connection to Susan, and she reached out to the app’s co-founder and CEO Rich Pierson, who sent her a statement about the partnership and indicated that Headspace didn’t play a role in making the meditations that go into the doll herself. 

“Headspace’s mission is to improve the health and happiness of the world. And to reach the world, we need to meet people where they are, including kids,” he said. “Over 8 million young people are connecting with Barbie on a weekly basis through her YouTube channel. . . Headspace believes it’s important to teach this new generation what mindfulness and meditation is all about.” The Wellness Collection fact sheet said something similar: “As the #1 girls brand on YouTube, with over 9 million subscribers and 13 billion minutes of viewed content, Barbie has a powerful platform to introduce girls to wellness practices in a relatable way.” 

In the end, Breathe with Me Barbie turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment. But I am not convinced that she is fundamentally incompatible with meditation. Perhaps she needs some time to settle into the practice—to figure out what works for her. 

I still can’t help but wonder if the people eager to make fun of a meditating Barbie are, on some level, harboring some degree of concern about religious authenticity. Maybe they worry that Buddhist meditation has been debased by neoliberalism or capitalism, or in the words of scholar Kathryn Lofton, “something pure has been put to unabashed commodity use.” But, as Lofton aptly observes in her book on the spirituality of another famous American icon, this kind of thinking “says a lot more about what we think is sacred and what we think is profane than about what believers (and consumers) consider sacred and profane.” 

While I don’t deny that neoliberal energy is pulsing through the modern-day mindfulness movement, I’m not so sure that this energy necessarily results in unwholesome, or shallow, meditative experiences—or that corporate culture will ultimately convert meditation into just another commodity to be bought and sold. By their own accounts, capitalist forces are also seeking liberation. Neoliberalism does not stealthily obscure its yearnings to produce a certain kind of subject—it proudly announces this goal to whomever it encounters. Margaret Thatcher once said, “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” Neoliberalism tries to free us by creating “free” markets; Barbie tries to do so by showing us that we can have it all. She said it herself:  “Girls can do anything.” 

Whether or not these methods work (or are good for our spiritual health) is always up for debate. But the question remains: How do we really know that Barbie is bereft of spiritual substance in the first place? How do we know that she isn’t capable of awakening? 

The post Meditation Barbie Wants to Be Your Dolly Lama appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Of the millions of viewers expected to watch Game of Thrones when it returns for its final season on April 14, few, if any, will be tuning in because they think it is a particularly Buddhist show. Yet a new tour at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City makes the case that the fantasy series and Buddhism have more in common than we might think.

Take, for example, this line spoken by the dragon-riding queen Daenerys Targaryen about the noble families: “Lannister, Targaryen, Baratheon, Stark, Tyrell. They’re all just spokes on a wheel. This one’s on top, then that one’s on top—and on and on it spins, crushing those on the ground . . . I’m not going to stop the wheel. I’m going to break the wheel.”

At a preview of the tour, our guide and the Rubin’s manager of docent and access programs, Laura Sloan, read this quote in front of a Tibetan painting of the wheel of life, depicting the cycle of birth and death. “What are some examples of rebirth in Game of Thrones?” Sloan asked. Multiple examples sprang to mind: the zombie hordes of the White Walkers, the reanimated knight known as The Mountain, the resurrected protagonist John Snow. As we continued, it quickly became clear that the similarities ran deeper than coincidental imagery, and more common themes begin to emerge: power, magic, religion in politics, desires—the list goes on.

For some, the violent and sexual imagery in the HBO series might appear to be fundamentally at odds with the peaceful and chaste depictions of the Buddha, but, as with any other belief system, Buddhists have not always lived up to their own ideals.

To demonstrate this, the tour stopped in front of an 18th-century painting depicting the fifth patriarch of the Sakya lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, Chogyal Pagpa (1235–1280), sitting beside the Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan (1215–1295). Sloan held up a picture of Cersei Lannister and read a quote from the diabolical queen: “The Faith and the Crown are the two pillars that hold up this world. One collapses, so does the other.”

Thrones fans will know that this line marks the beginning of a union between Cersei and the seemingly benign High Sparrow, a man-of-the-people religious figure who preaches poverty but seeks out power. However, their alliance ends (spoiler alert) after the High Sparrow imprisons, tortures, and then publicly shames Cersei, who retaliates by blowing up his church with everyone inside.

This over-the-top piece of fiction highlights a harsh reality—that the historical relationships between Buddhist and political leaders have been far from pristine. Like the High Sparrow’s devout enforcers, the Faith Militant, some Tibetan Buddhist monasteries had “defense” forces, despite their espoused non-violent views. And while spiritual leaders like Chogyal Pagpa and his predecessor and uncle Sakya Pandita (1182–1251) were said to be instructing the ruling class in Buddhist teachings in order to ennoble them, they benefited from the protection of armies and wealth of conquerors. In fact, the Chogyal Pagpa-Kublai Khan painting is part of an exhibition called Faith and Empire: Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism, which demonstrates that these unscrupulous pacts have existed throughout time. (Moral ambiguity, of course, is not limited to Tibetan Buddhism.) In some cases, Buddhist leaders were even called upon to wage magical warfare upon political enemies (think Stannis Baratheon and the Red Witch). Having religious figures cast spells and secure the aid of protector deities became a common practice in Tibet and China.

For the Thrones fans who are more interested in battles than political intrigue, Himalayan Buddhist art has much to offer as well. Large scale paintings depict holy wars, where Buddhist warriors can be seen wielding vajras, mace-like weapons that represent an unstoppable force and are sometimes depicted as thunderbolts. The works offer a  mythologized version of what were historical clashes between Buddhist kingdoms and their enemies. These revisionist histories cover up the nuance of these struggles, painting the victors as divine heroes, much like how the propagandist plays in Game of Thrones sing the praises of whoever happens to be king.

Demons, fierce warriors, zombies—once the comparisons start, the temptation to point out connections between Buddhism and Game of Thrones becomes hard to resist. But Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin has never spoken about Buddhist influences in his work and has instead pointed to European history as his inspiration, so any apparent overlap is likely unintentional. The common themes may be due to a shared interest in human struggles—or perhaps our minds are just good at finding patterns wherever we search for them.

Regardless of the reason, the numerous links between these two seemingly unrelated worlds speaks to a shared need for myth and meaning across eras, continents, and cultures. And at the very least, they can serve as an endless source of amusement and fascination.

The Rubin Museum’s Game of Thrones tours begin on April 12.

The post What Do Buddhism and <em>Game of Thrones</em> Have in Common? More Than You Might Think. appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.