Killing the Buddha

Seven years. That’s how long it has been since KillingTheBuddha.com began. Seven! That’s 63 in Web years. When KtB was born, there were no blogs; Salon was big news; the guy who started Facebook was in junior high.

Old enough to know better, young enough to find something else to do, we who have been here since the beginning have moved on to writing books, having babies, and publishing in magazines that use actual paper. Much as we wish we could keep KtB going, there’s just no more time.

It has been a great deal of fun making this site happen. Many thanks to all who rode along with us. If there’s something we’ve published that you can’t live without, have no fear: We’ll leave the archive up until the internets fall down.

yo ktb,

count me stupid (my wife will confirm) but i can’t
figure out what you did to your website?
it’s gotta be the biggest fucked up confusion i’ve
seen since the old rooster caught his pecker in the
chicken wire fencing!

blah, blah, blah

cock-a-doodle-doo!

jack of the universe

The best religion book of 2007 is finally in a bookstore near you. Two longtime friends of KtB, Scott Korb and Peter Bebergal, have teamed up to write the most honest account of what it means to struggle with belief — and toward it, and away from it — that we’ve read in years.

The Faith Between Us should be required reading for anyone asking big questions, not just about God, but friendship, family, commitment, and love. Take the advice St. Augustine heard from on high: pick up this book and read it. While you’re at it, buy yourself an extra copy — give one to a friend and enjoy excellent conversations about this excellent conversation of a book.

We rarely publish poetry here at KtB, but this week one of our own (which is to say me, Laurel Snyder, the person typing this) has released a book of poems.  A book of poems called, “The Myth of the Simple Machines”.

And because a few of these poems are kinda relig-ish, and because such poetry doesn’t always appeal to the straight-up lit-blog crowd, and because I can…

I’m reprinting a few of the poems here, now, for your poetical pleasure.  I’d like to believe they’re in keeping with the spirit of KtB, but then, I’d like to believe in general…

**

In the Kitchen 

God clacks his spoon
against his bowl, 
his bowl against his table,
and his table against
the yellow walls of his house.   

God’s impatient or just
keeping time.   

The soup isn’t hot enough yet, 
so he waits, writes his name
on a yellowing cookbook
where the dust is thick and moist. 
He writes “God.”   

God’s a sloppy housewife. 
He sits on the counter,
stares at his slippers, 
watches the pot of soup
until it boils on the stove.   

It smells like cabbage and turns the day
into what God calls “supper.”

God reaches for the salt and thinks
about his dreams, how they’re full
of other people, other things.
God tears into the bread and it feels
nice, close against his fingers.

He finds his teacup cracked
and whimpers. He can fix it
but it will still have been broken.
God pulls the teacup to his belly
and holds it there, hard.

He says to the room,
“Look! Something might happen.”

(this poem first appeared in Parlorgames magazine)

**

Logos

1.

And this earth was once
Confused and tangled
And darkness.  

And God called to the light,
Day! And to the dark
He called, Night! 

And suddenly, he saw giant
God-fingers making shapes
Through the murk. 

And God called
To the fingers and to
The things they felt. 

And in the white room
A man watches his hands
Beat and bruise a thing. 

And he relents and breathes
Into the white room, and sees
That the thing is now just that. 

And so he calls to the thing
And the moment and the air
Hovering in the room. Thing! 

And then again he calls,
Clearly and flatly: Time of Death: 12:32
He calls to the time. 

And elsewhere, Our Father who art—
You fucking whore you fucking slut—
I think We’ll call you Emma—  

And elsewhere, I will—
My body which will be given up for you—
My name is X and I’m an alcoholic— 

2.

Nobody can say word
Is not the nature
of saying.  What we are.

(This poem first appeared in the Iowa Review) 

If monks in Myanmar weren’t marching against the military junta this week, they would likely be taking part in a march of another kind. Late September is traditionally the time for one of Myanmar’s largest religious festivals, held just 100 miles north of Yangon, epicenter of the protests and scene of increasingly violent government response.

Myanmar has been described as the most devoutly Buddhist nation on earth. Ninety percent of its citizens count themselves as followers of Buddha, and those who devote their lives to following his path, Buddhist monks and nuns, are held in universally high esteem.

So it’s no small affair when, once a year and only for a few days, the Buddha’s Tooth Relic, the most revered spiritual artifact in the country, is removed from its shrine in the town of Paung-de. Placed on the back of an elephant, the tooth relic is then paraded through the city to bestow blessings on all who behold it. Thousands of monks and other devotees follow in procession, filling the streets with burgundy robes, the smell of incense, and the cacophony of drums, gongs, and chanted prayers.

It’s a scene that seems as though it could have occurred a thousand years ago, and it might lead one to wonder if the monks learned to create such a spectacle for reasons very different than those for which they march now.

Yet it is not so simple that one instance of marching monks is religious and one is political. Even the most purely political actions can have religious causes; even apparently religious events can be political to their core. And even something which seems as timeless and apolitical as a religious relic – in this case, a piece of the Buddha’s tooth said to be recovered from his funeral pyre 2500 years ago – can be so tied up in the machinations of the state that it’s impossible to know where religion ends and politics begins.

It turns out that Myanmar’s tooth relic was a gift – more of a loan, actually – from the officially irreligious and atheistic government of China. The tooth has served a bargaining chip between the two nations for decades. When Myanmar — then called Burma — initially asked to arrange a visit for the tooth in the 1950s , the Chinese were so dismissive of it that they reportedly replied with a disdainful, “Take it, we have no use for it.” Only on reflection did they realize what a powerful political object they had in their possession.

They have made excellent use of it since then, periodically loaning it to the Myanmar junta, which in turn used it as a display of its own power, and moreover as a way of organizing its devout population to its own ends. Every year when the tooth was removed from its shrine and paraded through the streets, it was as much a statement of political will as religious devotion. The politics may have been hidden beneath layers of burgundy robes and pious chanting, but they were there no less than, yes, a tooth hidden behind a tight-lipped grin.

Religion has a long and infamous history, in every tradition, of being used by the state. Yet in Myanmar this month we are reminded that it can also be used in defiance of it.
As similar as one group of marching monks might look to another, they chose to fill the streets for another reason this year. Not in a state-sponsored parade behind a tooth that has become a political pawn, but behind one of their own, carrying a megaphone.

“Good evening, I had not thought of the Louvin Brothers in a long time. Not that they had gone anywhere, I had. I started to review their song list and immediately grabbed a pen and started to write the words to “Praying,” “River of Jordan” and “Last Chance to Pray,” etc. You see I used to sing these songs in Church, that was before I turned my back on the Church. My girlfriend and I sang harmony… sounded a lot like them at that time. Always sang the altar call. Baptist Church, of course. I have seen every member of the Church in the altar when we sang “Last Chance to Pray.” I also saw my Dad have to leave the Church house and pace the yard as we sang. That was a long time ago. I gave up my voice to smoking. Now I have quit smoking and well who knows? Maybe I could sing again… I remember when Charlie died. I thought it was terrible for him to be an alcoholic, now I know it an illness. Just wanted to voice the emotions I felt today as I read about these wonderful brothers. I could never forget them. God Bless Ira and family. I know God has already Blessed Charlie. I am Opal”

For you, Opal:

The question of where morality comes from remains a bee in the bonnet of both religionists and philosophers. Or perhaps it only seems so because we’ve lately been reading a few books on the subject. What emerges from this reading is nagging feeling that talking about the origins of morality is a way of talking about God now that talk about God has been so thoroughly hashed and rehashed, dissected and inspected, that the word doesn’t mean what it used to — for better or worse, though mostly for better.

“God” rarely rings precisely the same way to any two people and so it’s usefulness as a marker of ultimate concerns may have in some ways come to an end. “Morality,” on the other hand, retains at least the illusion of agreement. We may differ on the particulars, but most would concur that the word has something to do with living a good life without doing much harm to others in the process.

So the question of moral origins in a good one, even if the idea of moral origins seems to deny the obvious: that morality is a process, not a discovery. All of which makes this New York Times report on evolution and ethics so interesting. Not only does it explore the excellently named concept of “moral dumbfounding,” it offers up a quote from University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt which could serve as yet another of KtB’s many slogans: “I first found divinity in disgust.”

Haidt wrote that line about the ways in which the primitive experience of disgust might have led to concepts of purity, which in turn inspired thoughts of ultimate purity, the divine. Of course, divinity has been known to breed disgust as well. For example:

Yes, we know that it is also Rosh Hashanah, but we’ve published so much already about the Jewish High Holidays that we thought it was time to blow another new year’s horn. That it happens to Ethiopia’s big day is convenient because it gives us a chance to tip our hat to some music that would feature prominently on the KtB soundtrack, if KtB had a soundtrack: Ethiopiques, the excellent collection of albums of Ethiopian jazz and pop from the 1960s and 70s, released by the aptly named French label Buda Musique.

No, it’s not particularly “religious” or “spiritual” (though the guy who gets up to show off his two-step is clearly moved by something), but here’s the KtB angle: A friend of ours recently had a cab ride with an Ethiopian driver in Washington, DC. He was playing one of Ethiopiques albums on his stereo and we he heard that our friend knew and liked the music he nearly drove off the road.

“You must go see them play!” the cab driver said.

“Where would I do that?” our friend asked.

“In Addis Ababa, of course! They are old men now, and the young people don’t know them. But they play in all the churches!”

We’ve just received an email asking us to clarify our religious affiliation by choosing one of the options on this long and peculiar menu:

NO - None
BP - Baptist
BU - Buddhist
CA - Catholic
CG - Congregational
DC - Disciples of Christ
EP - Episcopal
HI - Hindu
IS - Islam
JE - Jewish
LD - Latter-Day Saints
LU - Lutheran
LW - Other
ME - Methodist
MN - Mennonite
OR - Orthodox
PR - Presbyterian
PT - Other Protestant
OT - Other
UC - United Church of Christ

It’s a pretty standard list used by colleges and other institutions which find it useful to gather aggregate demographic statistics. We’re sure we’ve seen this exact religious run-down before, but for the first time we noticed that while there is just one type of Jewish listed, there are two types of Other. Anyone care to guess what distinguishes one Other from the other Other?

Special bonus question for the salaried, Jumble-loving time-wasters among you: Can you make a sentence using only words formed with the letter groups above?

Six years ago today, sitting in front of a television with the rest of the country, we jotted down a few thoughts that soon became a reflection on the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Two wars later, we see some of the strange fruit those attacks planted: news of the ongoing purge of religion collections in prison libraries across the US.

As it happens, we know a little bit about religion in prison – not because we’ve done time, but because we once tagged along with a Buddhist nun who serves as a volunteer chaplain at a federal lockup in Maryland.

It was quite an education, though not necessarily in Buddhist principles. What we learned was that, for many prisoners, a weekly window of time for fulfilling some sort of spiritual practice was the one right that could not be taken from them for any reason, punitive or otherwise. And so it seemed that like the old saying about atheists in foxholes, there were no inmates who were unwilling to consider being Buddhists every Tuesday night. So long as being Buddhist meant they could get out of their cells and sit for an hour with a bald lady in robes, it sounded alright by them.

For the nun, the weekly routine involved a pass through a metal detector, and then a check of any materials she was bringing in — usually a tape of ocean sounds and a few photocopied sheets filled with phonetic renderings of Tibetan prayers, which she would encourage her students to chant. It sounded something like this: MA HA SA MA YA SATO AH, and never have foreign sounds been chanted with such gusto as I heard that night.

Because Tuesday evening was the time for other religious groups to meet as well, through the door drifted other sounds, other songs. Like the Tibetan chant, they were all about liberation in one way or another, each subversive in its own way.

We’re thinking of calling our friend the nun and asking if MA HA SA MA YA SATO AH has set off any alarms.