Daniel Bornstein's "Medieval Christianity": Book Review

Recovering the testimony of medieval laity, often illiterate, from scattered records of the clergy, the law, and the landlord challenges any historian. These essays, directed at a general readership, add to the clerical and elite dominant discourse the peasants, the women, the artisans, the children, and, in their wills, even "the dead and those they left behind." I found this volume attractively designed, very readable, and efficiently researched. It's the fourth part of a new series, "A People's History of Christianity," gen. ed. Denis R. Janz, from Fortress Press in Minneapolis.

The contributors avoid jargon; sidebars offer glimpses into primary texts. For instance, pastoral guidance on hearing confessions from around the 1220s-30s:

"A priest should make a brief interrogation of those whose flesh is weak in the following manner: 'Either you knew that the women whom you approached for sex was unmarried or you didn't. If you knew she was single, you are due a lesser penance; if you didn't know then you are obliged to do a greater penance because she might have been a married woman, a nun, or related to you through affinity, or she may have had relations with your father."' (209)

This excerpt from Roberto Rusconi's essay on "Hearing Women's Sins" shows many qualities of the whole presentation: direct speech, no-nonsense tone, intriguing detail, abundant illustrations, and a depiction of how the few sources that experts have excavated can reveal the mindset and anxieties and predicaments that ordinary people found themselves in, perhaps not as different than we assume from our own times.

Yet, as with finding out how churches might be used for storing firefighting equipment, how burials tended to be most lavish for men of martial prowess and women of childbearing age, and how the main obsession of Jews, Muslims, and Christians prevented from marrying each other in Spain seemed to be how they could sleep with each other and avoid the law, we get glimpses of the differences.

Daniel Bornstein edits this work and provides a chapter on "Relics, Ascetics, Living Saints." Of its holy women, we ponder how they

"threw themselves into ovens, fell into fireplaces, starved themselves, bound themselves with chains, macerated their flesh with hair shirts, and lacerated it with whips. In return, they were rewarded with equally bodily manifestations. Their bodies levitated and lactated, gave off heavenly perfumes, and oozed miracle-working oils. With an appalling literalness, their bodies demonstrated the simple truth of religious metaphors, images that to others had become mere clichés." (98-99)

By such clarity, scholars explain to us how the Middle Ages prove distant in not only time but thinking.

Churches then were not, however, pious and scrubbed sanctuaries as they may look to us as curated heritage environments today. Meteors, a stuffed crocodile, and "a huge bone said to have belonged to a giant cow that supplied milk for all of Bristol" were among the curiosities displayed for visitors to what then served as not only the house of prayer but the equivalent of our farmer's market or big-box warehouse-- and sanctuaries for felons and feuders. Richard Kieckhefer's essay on the architectural impact of churches goes beyond the expected boundaries that such sights often limit us to exploring today in their ruins or restorations.

Gary Dickson covers a topic as relevant today as then: religious fervor by its revivals. Then as now, the public devotion could be fickle. In 1448 Perugia, a chronicler notes the conversion of one "Eliseo, who was a foolish young man. . . .When three or four months had passed, this Eliseo di Cristofano of Porta Sant'Agnolo left the friary and went back to being a barber, and he is known as Mr. Lord God; and he later took a wife, and was a bigger scoundrel than he had been before." (171) Out of such vignettes, we start to recognize our ancestors as our peers.

As I did my doctoral dissertation on "The Idea of Purgatory in Middle English Literature" (sadly missing from the documentation herein), I was eager to read the final chapter by a professor whose work I had used, R.N. Swanson. In "The Burdens of Purgatory," he handles this difficult concept deftly and with a bit of wit. He cites a fifteenth-century Carthusian ms. with what he labels "salvation by civil engineering."

Swanson tells how

"Purgatory appears precisely as a holding tank, where souls are cleansed. They are winched up to Christ, to Heaven, in batches, by a pulley mechanism. Two different forces set the pulley in motion (and, although this is not actually indicated, identify the particular souls that are to be saved): the Mass, celebrated by the clergy (but available to be commissioned by the laity), and alms deeds, works of charity, which would be generally be performed by the laity." (356)

Again, the tendency of contributors to provide simple clarification for terms a general reader may need assistance with or reminders of can be seen in this excerpt.

One small caveat: of course, I didn't expect my dissertation to be mentioned; this book is for the educated common reader. Naturally the sources suggested throughout the anthology tend to be ideal; one slight drawback is that for specialists, it's not possible to track back to the primary sources paraphrased or summarized in the chapters, as endnotes may be used less by some professors. In Swanson's useful essay, only four endnotes appear while his colleagues have up to ten times as many references appended to their chapters. Some essays have four or five notes; others have dozens. Consulting this chapter, while I can see the "evocative depiction" I just quoted is this "Carthusian manuscript," I cannot immediately ascertain from Swanson which one it is, or where it's archived or edited.

Space prevents me from elaboration, but for the record, the other fine contributors: Yitzhak Hen on "Converting the Barbarian West;" Bonnie Effros on "Death and Burial;" André Vauchez on "Clerical Celibacy and the Laity;" Grado G. Merlo on "Heresy and Dissent;" Teofilo F. Ruiz on "Jews, Muslims and Christians" in Spain; Diana Webb on "Domestic Religion;" Katharine L. French on "Parish Life." (Posted to my blog, and earlier to Amazon US 7-13-09.)

Jarvis Masters: Justice Denied

African-American, Tibetan Buddhist, on San Quentin's Death Row: Jarvis Masters faces the ultimate sentence for a crime he did not commit. Jailhouse conversions often get dismissed as ploys, and pleas of innocence ignored as lies. But, his case rings true after being exposed for its false tone.

I had decided to look up the case of Jarvis Masters, after the chapter in the book I reviewed here last week (and inevitably on Amazon US), "Re-Enchantment" by Jeffery Paine on the spread of Tibetan Buddhism, had alerted me to Jarvis Masters' case. Perhaps I could learn from his hard-won calm after being the kind of youth that may have, who knows, found himself on the street not far from where I taught, a youth not in class but out of control, among others just as deluded.

My family and I watched a double bill the previous day. It started with "I Want to Live," the 1950s noirish neo-documentary film with Susan Hayward's harrowing Oscar-winning performance as Barbara Graham. A true story-- for she was framed and executed although not guilty, due to the police's determination to convict her for a murder committed by her colleagues, her past criminal record including perjury, and her desparate attempt to find an alibi that led her into entrapment by two jailhouse informants, one undercover and the other released for her own connivance. The film captures the dramatic situation movingly. Whatever one's views on the morality of carrying out the death sentence on those convicted for crimes they committed, the role of entrapment, set-ups, and past misdeeds coloring future behavior, or being confused with it, does indelibly tarnish this endlessly controversial issue.

The second was a National Geographic documentary on three Texas Death Row prisoners as they fought by appeals and pleas a stay from their own executions. Layne tearfully, me dry-eyed, watched this. (See her blog entry,"Apollo Rising".) Her correspondence with three prisoners begun earlier this year has drawn her inexorably into marathon watchings of "Lockup" and "Lockdown." We're sending the prisoners books and we will see one of them soon.

One of those in Texas condemned had been convicted of murder even though the victim had already died before he stabbed her; Layne had years before met and corresponded with a prisoner in for life whose only freedom from the chair or gas chamber (which she tells me is not used anymore really) is that California goes back and forth on moratoria and the prisoner's case lucked out chronologically, after a very high-profile trial bent on demonizing her role in the death of her victim. We differ as couples may on this issue; despite my being personally neutral all my life on the issue of capital punishment for the guilty, my wife is vehemently opposed.

She slept poorly, and I wondered about how the documentary had upset her. I felt like the entire blame for our unjust justice system had been placed on me. All three men in our house noticed her mood had shifted downward, so I sought to restore some tranquility. I had meant to find out more about the case of the black Buddhist at San Quentin anyhow, and I took the t.v. screen's double-feature as an impetus.

While Jarvis Jay Masters does not have a feature film or media frenzy to thank for his support, he has published two memoirs from prison. Arrested at nineteen, he was sentenced to death while incarcerated-- after one of the state's longest trials that relied on plea-bargains, informants, entrapment, uncorroborated allegations and unreliable evidence after a prison guard was murdered. His death sentence rests on the "fact" that he sharpened the murder weapon; he never came near Guard Burchfield, for at the time of his murder, Masters was locked in his cell on another tier.

He denies that he had anything to do with the prison guard's murder. He's a year younger than me, born in the city where I teach, Long Beach. He has a detailed website-- and a Facebook connection-- devoted to righting the wrongs of his case. It's under appeal and review at the moment. Much more than I can summarize can be found at "Free Jarvis.org."

From that homepage, the start of his background:

Jarvis Jay Masters is a widely-published African American Buddhist writer living on San Quentin's Death Row. Thousands of people have read his stories and essays. A growing international community of concerned citizens is calling for his wrongful conviction to be overturned. This website was created by the Committee to Free Jarvis Jay Masters. It does not originate in San Quentin.

Jarvis Masters was convicted of participating in the killing of a prison guard, Sergeant Howell Burchfield, despite the fact that he was in another part of the prison when the guard was killed. Another prisoner was convicted of actually stabbing Sergeant Burchfield, and a third man of ordering the killing. We have deep sympathy for the Burchfield family’s loss, and while we respect their desire for justice, we believe that Jarvis is not guilty of the crime for which he alone was given the death sentence.

This website provides an introduction to Jarvis Masters' life and work. You can find out about Jarvis's background. We have provided a summary of how and why Jarvis was sentenced to death, and an update on his appeal. We also set out why we believe Jarvis is innocent.

While living on death row, Jarvis has become an eloquent writer. Read about his highly-praised books That Bird Has My Wings: An Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row (how to order it) as well as Finding Freedom -- Writings From Death Row (how to order it). Both books have been praised by such important figures as Desmond Tutu, Sister Helen Prejean, and Angela Davis.

An important aspect of Jarvis's life on Death Row has been his Buddhist practice. Read about how Jarvis became a Buddhist, and how meditation has changed his life and affected the lives of his fellow prisoners.

My P.S. Other sites linked from the "Free Jarvis" page include related organizations committed to similarly corrective paths for correctional facilities' inmates. For example, at "Buddhist Peace Fellowship" and "Prison Dharma Network". Jewish and Christian groups work alongside and within the BPF. Its prison program is "committed to transformation of the prison industrial complex through advocacy, networking, ministry, and correspondence with people in prisons and jails."

The Prison Dharma project, based in Colorado but international, non-denominational, and non-sectarian, trains facilitators to work with troubled prisoners. It "supports prisoners in the practice of contemplative disciplines, with emphasis on the meditation practices of the various Buddhist traditions. PDN also promotes the Buddhist path of wakefulness and non-aggression as an ideal means of self-rehabilitation and transformation."

Joan Hoff & Marian Yeates' "The Cooper's Wife is Missing": Book Review

Hyped as "The Tipperary Witch Case," peddled as "The Cloneen 'Fairy' Mystery," shunned as "The Ballyvadlea Horror," Bridget Cleary's 1895 burning by her husband to free her from the spell of the fairies-- no sprites but terrors-- comprises the reason she was said to have went missing. "It's a simple story that shows how simple beliefs can shape big events." (392) Two historians eschew feminist theories (for these see Angela Bourke's 1999 study), arguing after sifting enormous amounts of primary evidence from court testimony, and secondary sources that span the nineteenth century far beyond the case itself.

Buried within closely-printed if fascinating "notes on sources," Hoff and Yeates sum up this thoroughly researched, if perhaps too broadly conceived, work: "the true power exercised in the Cleary incident was the power of fairy beliefs, which, at a critical juncture of Bridget's illness, overrode the individual power of the men in her life, and the collective power of the state, religion, and medicine." (439) The Church, eager to ally itself not with "superstition" of the credulous peasantry but with Home Rule and respectable Irish nationalism under local but powerful prelate Archbishop Croke (about to celebrate his Golden Jubilee of ordination), strove to distance itself from complicity with Fenians, agrarian agitators, and "paganism." Unionists used the Cleary case to embarrass the Church; Justice William O'Brien labored long to implicate the clergy with those seven local men sentenced to hard labor for her death. The British and Irish press rushed to sensationalize the skulduggery.

Hoff and Yeates labor mightily to recover the contexts. It's nearly a hundred pages of local history, Parnell, and even Brian Boru (who could not have fought except in legend if at the Boulick "in the twelfth century," [pg. 9]-- having died after Clontarf's battle in 1014) before Bridget's fatal nine-day torment commences. Nine days, as the authors helpfully explain, for beyond nine for Celts lay infinity. (165) Nine days, therefore, a window in which Michael Cleary and his neighbors and father-in-law sought to allay their suspicions about the wandering, headstrong, infertile, and folk-remedy inclined woman who, according to lore they all believed, had her body taken by the fairies, the threatening forces of the Otherworld that haunted rural life even as the Church and nationalists longed to advance Irish causes.

"How could anyone seriously consider granting political independence to a nation whose populace still believed in fairies?" (9) This was the implicit challenge dramatized by the ordeal of Bridget. Her assailants sincerely believed that they had but nine days to free her from her plight, for unless of her own will she chose to return to her mortal body, her changeling spirit would inhabit it while her true self was spirited off to the underworld forever. If Michael and his mates failed to convince her to come back, the fairy forces could abduct her with never a hope of return. By exorcising her, with the help of the priest and of iron as they entered the feared fairy-fort at midnight if through ancient if crude and repulsive and violent rituals her freedom was not first attained, they hoped to heal her of her mysterious pains. By such desperation, her husband and neighbors and father tried to tame the strong-willed woman, who'd never born a child after eight years, and who seemed maddeningly to resist the conformity expected of her, as if she continued to embody the women in her own line who were said to employ herbal remedies and cures.

If the changeling within Bridget was not expelled, they held she'd fulfill the folk tales, and die. If the creature imitating her was driven out by urine, beatings, and fire, however, Bridget might return. The folk tales also assured him of this hope.

With great sympathy, the historians allow us to enter this now-vanished frame of the traditional Irish mind. They avoid facile second-guessing or anachronistic theories; their scholarship rests on archives, books, visits to the long-abandoned Cleary cabin, and interviews with locals still spooked or annoyed long into the twentieth century by the blame cast upon South Tipp. Reviewers have sniffed at the anti-British or Protestant-blaming tone, but this reflects the nationalist accounts themselves as filtered through Hoff & Yeates' attempt to recreate this mindset. And, when one reads of the Famine with "entire families walling themselves inside their mud huts to die together with a modicum of dignity," indeed for many later in the century, "these images would not go away." (13)

Those contending against long memories of oppressed "Old Irishry" encountered hostility. "The constable made it his business to know everything because his life depended on it." Often a peasant's son, one who "tended to be brighter than average but was a social leper in his own community-- an insider made forever an outcast because he was too bright to spend his life mowing the landlord's hay, too complacent to leave, and too willing to betray his countrymen. If he needed good ears, sharp eyes, and quick reflexes, he also needed a thick skull." (111) They preface this pithy description with a nearly Sherlockian account of how the RIC man could observe at a few casual glances an "Irish Yankee," a Fenian returned from the Civil War to subvert the calm slumber of the southwest countryside, with its persistent rebel reputation.

This detail may seem the sort of tangential one that some readers skim over. I admit the trials themselves wore on with more recitals than I personally needed, but others will benefit from the diligence shown here. Similarly, while the extended forays into the storied setting of Slievenamon and Charles Kickham of one-time "Knocknagow" fame seemed detours, they will inspire others to follow up with their own forays into the footnotes, as I will with a couple linking Victorian titillation to the fairy craze spinning off of the Celtic Revival! (I add that singer Liam Clancy's memoir "The Mountain of the Women"-- the probable derivation for Slievenamon's looming presence over the region-- and Patricia Monaghan's chapter on the same area in her folkloric feminism fashioned as "The Red-Haired Woman from the Bog" will both satisfy those wanting more on Southwest Irish landscapes, women, and lore. Find truly frightening encounters with fairy folk collected by Eddie Lenihan in "Meeting the Other Crowd." I've reviewed these on this blog and on Amazon US.)

Therefore, as I read on, I realized how Hoff & Yeates strive to illuminate the shadows over the Cleary case itself for a wider audience than the Irish, and more academic, one of Burke's history published but the year before. The accused, both Bridget and those sentenced for her death, emerge as people that, as far as the limits of documents and newsprint can restore, you learn to understand as caught up in forces, Crown or fairy, Celtic or political, Catholic or judicial, that they cannot control. For an American, this book may daunt by its heft and detail, but out of such attention, one comes away with a far more comprehensive perspective on the whole century that culminated in an unwitting showdown between the pressures of modernity and those of tradition. (Posted to Amazon US 6-25-09.)

"Brüno" Comes Out

Opening night, my wife (we are permissive when it comes to film; my wife and many of the families we socialize with work in Hollywood so my kids have grown up with a lot of films that others would not see until older; I admit even the ticket seller was warning us) and my younger, if über-sophisticated, son (he wanted to see it without us separately with friends as his 16-year-old brother was--somehow at another theater in the trust-fund boho district-- but little bro could not) saw "Brüno." Quite a few older people walked out during the film, even in hipster downtown L.A. (Older son says nobody did in the Los Feliz-Silver Lake venue, unsurprisingly.) Sacha Baron Cohen as with "Borat" takes on a daring mix of satire and social commentary in his comedy that both celebrates and denigrates how gays often perform in front of straights and how many straights fear and hate gays. Note the verbal distinctions.

This reminded me of [in the threaded discussion for the class I teach in a topic about ethics vs. free speech, a student's] comment about porn-- the film barely got an "R" rather that "NC" rating; I figured better to have my kid see it with us so we could put it into context; my older son is very film-savvy and understands what Baron Cohen's getting at with his satire. One person's erotica is another's smut, I suppose. Although no sexual images or scenes in "Brüno" any more than "Borat" can be seen as titillating! When sexual excess is paraded so comically and obviously, it turns either to humor at its sheer ridiculousness at our body's lusts and longings, or it makes people, as in the movie, walk away in disgust at such revelations.

That's I guess how satire works: it exaggerates our hidden desires and secret behaviors until, as with a stand-up comedian or a gross-out comedy, we can only shrink away in horror or learn to laugh at ourselves and our weak, desperate, and perhaps frightening human desires for attention, satisfaction, fun, and greed. A difficult set of rights to protect by the First Amendment from a time when the Founding Fathers may never have dreamed up what "Borat" & "Brüno" parade on the screen, but I am glad we have the flexibility to have a country that allows such freedom. Others of course condemn America for such folly and warn us of damnation.

Ironic that the film has jokes about Jesus, the Holocaust, Osama, and Hasidic Jews, but when it comes to Michael Jackson, the scene with LaToya had to be cut at the last moment, so as not to offend. Talk about a skewed sense of moral priorities.

The above was my response in the on-line component of the college speech course I have started teaching, to a student body generally very conservative, from immigrant/ first-generation poor or working class backgrounds; so far students in the discussion thread have defended the right to speak about Christianity vs. school restrictions, and debated hate-speech restrictions on campuses vs. claims for First Amendment rights.

P.S. I add that older brother told me only this week that younger brother did not know until only this week what "heterosexual" meant. Although they both doubtless have heard "metrosexual" for years now. Seeing where we live, what they see, and whom they know, is this progress?

See promo film's trailer-- and click for the "Englisch" link but this may have been hacked-- at one of the rare domain names not yet taken, until by the "hottest white guy since Jesus": "MeinSpace.com". Photo from the "Elephant Journal" with links to NY Times review and videos re: film's plea for gay tolerance, or lack of: "Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt"

Ken Bruen's "Sanctuary": Book Review

The seventh in the series opens with Jack Taylor finding out that Ban Garda Ridge, "my partner in hostility and uneasy alliance for years," has breast cancer. Recovering at home, "if recuperating means sitting in an armchair, listening to the kind of whining music they give free razor blades with, and drinking." (12) If this acerbic tone strikes a chord, you'll welcome, if that's the word, another harsh tale.

Galway's no more welcoming, as the native Irish seemed to have disappeared, with nary a local accent to be heard amidst the drunks, non-nationals, "service industry," and newly rich that flood Jack's hometown. Lonely, in this novel he has nobody to turn to at all; nemesis Father Malachy pops up regularly to snarl at him, and the temptations of both drugs and drink loom larger than ever as he sets out in his haphazard manner to try to stop another serial killer.

This time, Stewart, an ex-drug dealer, helps him: "I trade information, nothing more valuable. It's not what you know but knowing what it is where the information lies." (95) Jack sneers, but he knows his own dangerous days are behind him after a dissolute life: "Do I look dangerous? Yeah, if an old guy with a hearing aid and a limp scares you." (94)

Every Jack Taylor story has him at the charity store tallying up his wardrobe, but "Sanctuary" (I wonder if Bruen will run out of single ecclesiastical nouns after three times in a titular row) lacks such thrift; for once, he's solvent enough to take on the usual suspects. The plot's simpler, almost to the point perhaps of summary rather than elaboration, and the action less violent; fewer run-ins with louts and more time spent among the down-and-outs on Eyre Square than on the shores of the Claddagh.

As always, Bruen through Taylor sums up his city's changes smartly. Shop Street's tourist mayhem, "buskers to the left of me, minstrels to the right," shows how Galwegian charm's thinned today. Its loutish youth sporting fake American accents complete with rapper slang, a dispiriting contrast with the busker's "Carrickfergus": "I stopped and listened to my heritage, my past, calling and cajoling through the ferocious sadness of that song. I put ten euro in that guy's cap and he winked, said, ''God and His family bless you.'" (99)

The prose relies less on musical references and literary citations than before, reflecting perhaps Jack's weariness. He wants to go to America, as so many before him, but policewoman Ridge's condition necessitates his staying around, so meanwhile he solves in his own erratic fashion another death spree. The understated way in which, however, he takes surprising revelations about one Siobhan did make me wonder how taciturn Taylor's realistically expected to be, at least with words if not emotions. There's his offhanded nature to this life-altering discovery and later Clancy's reaction to dramatic news that left me underwhelmed.

This emotional distancing may be intentional, as Bruen strives to filter Taylor's often semi-opaque, muddy, rather than translucent interior state. Stewart's Zen, parodied as it is, may reveal a true lesson in Part Two's epigraph from Seng-Ts'an: "If you work on your mind with your mind, how you can avoid an immense confusion?" (125) In the end, a white feather offers a poignant symbol of the "defeated miracle" that life may represent on this or another, unseen realm. I'll leave it to you to figure this allusion out within these spare, grim, but still somehow soulful pages in the latest Jack Taylor installment (at least in America, where we lag behind one per year! I've reviewed them all as with this one on Amazon US-- and the recent ones on this blog too).

Rodger Kamenetz' "Stalking Elijah: Adventures with Today's Jewish Mystical Masters": Book Review

This sequel to "The Jew in the Lotus" continues his quest for meaning, integrating Tibetan Buddhist aspirations towards silence and emptiness with Jewish traditions of kabbalah, meditation, and non-intellectual search for the ultimately Unknowable One. "Our knowledge of God is passive," he's told.

That is, according to Rabbi Art Green: "We do active things to reach the place of the passive knowledge of God." (220) Green tries to get to the place, as a liberal, that only the ultra-Orthodox assert, the way to grasp God interiorly. Kamenetz twice imagines the Jews burdened into the wilderness, dragging "fleischik" and "milchik" pots, carrying multivolumed commentaries on their backs. He admires the Tibetan emphasis upon the inner search, and his book takes him to the rabbis and teachers who try to recover, or invent, ways in which modern Jews-- the 85% who are no longer able to be "naive" believers in the God of history after the Enlightenment, assimilation, secularism, and the Shoah-- can try to regain, as Green models, a way to get beyond the legalism of the "ba'al teshuvah" neo-Orthodox. The problem with simply "returning" to the shetl is that today's Jews who do so have not learned from their grandparents how to live as Jews; one cannot gain this from a stack of commentaries or a practice tethered to legalism.

Rodger Kamenetz interviews different teachers of Jewish meditation, kabbalah (the non-Madonna marketed glitzy kind), and alternative, counter-cultural influenced rabbis who try to get beyond the impatience, anger, chatter, and kibbitzing of "Jewishness" to find a more calm, silently lurking, and personally meaningful "Judaism" that may appeal to those not ready to accept Orthodoxy as the only way, but who may shrink from synagogue routines, boring prayers recited aloud, facile God-talk and touchy-feely platitudes. "It's not a simple dilemma, the struggle between humility and chutzpah, between equanimity and passion, between Jewish and Judaism." (210) Kamenetz uses his own interest in Tibetan Buddhism (this book follows his "The Jew in the Lotus"--recently reviewed by me on this blog & Amazon US-- about the 1990 encounter of Jewish rabbis and teachers with the Dalai Lama) and his own skepticism as an assimilated, largely secular Jew trying to connect with mystical and spiritual paths into whatever God might, or might not, be.

Screenwriter turned "maggid," or storyteller Paul Woolf tells him how the best characters are those in denial. We and our planet share this denial: "About who our creator is and what we should be about." Those who are Jewish, Woolf affirms, must work from within their community and tradition to find their soul's home even if "God is not Jewish." For, "Judaism is our way to God." (173) Yet, bickering and jockeying continue to separate wrangling Jews on Torah's path. For instance, Woolf-- after an "endless discussion" about whether Orthodox or non-Orthodox "are doing it right" and his own struggle with reconciling an inability to conform to Jewish tradition even as he seeks its meaningful messages-- offers Kamenetz this analogy.

"Our ancestors, who were all Orthodox, went on an adventure. They found a pristine, beautiful, endlessly deep lake with the purest sparkling, azure blue water. They mapped out a path to this lake and it was very precise. Turn left here, go right here. They said, 'If you want to reach this lake, follow this map, because we worked on it and we're not bullshitting you-- this works.' Then somewhere along the line somebody who wouldn't follow that map found the lake and told the other mapmakers about it. They said, 'You're crazy. You couldn't possibly get there without this map.' They started to argue about it. They argued and argued for centuries-- and nobody went swimming. That's what we're doing. Nobody's going into the lake. Go into the lake!"

He continues:

"I say to my Orthodox friends who want to argue with me, 'I tell you what, I'm not going to convince you and you're not going to convince me. Go in the lake. That's the most important thing. That's where you're supposed to be. Go in the lake!" Paul paused and added, 'And if you see me in the lake, don't be too surprised.'" (175)

Woolf's teacher, Jonathan Omer-Man, who accompanied Kamenetz to Dharamsala in 1990, remains along with fellow rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi the guide for Kamenetz in this sequel. With his own pain and struggles, his diffidence and his reserve, he provides a telling counterpart and contrast with the exuberant Zalman. Omer-Man provides a fascinating analogy of his own.

So far, the book intermittently had kept my interest; I have no attraction to kabbalah and the lack of exoticism that made the Indo-Tibetan travelogue naturally captivating makes much of this sequel more mundane. This speaks well to the struggle to find the core meaning of Judaism beneath the superficial glitz of the renewal rabbis, but it does make for a less dazzling meeting of minds than Dharamsala. It's as if, with Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill," the settings of the sensational East tend to look awkward or bizarre when plonked beside a congested freeway or strip-mall. Yet in such locales, Kamenetz listens and begins to understand ancient truths.

That may be the point: how difficult it is to bring home captivating Jewish teaching into staid American practice. Trying to explain kabbalistic cosmology (which provides a leitmotif in this narrative, if not always in the most scintillating manner despite the patient efforts of rabbis and the yearning writer to make this esotericism clear to the general reader), Omer-Man hits upon the pertinent image that for me made these rarified concepts of time, space, and life finally more relevant.

Flow of energy from on high is punctuated into breaks akin to bytes of information. "There are packets, but the space between the packet determines the nature of the packet." As Kamenetz elucidates, in the gaps of non-communication, of lack of connection, the energy received is defined. Similar to the silences revealing more than the words spoken in conversation, this helps Kamenetz (and me) with his problem. Ever since he met Rabbi Zalman, with his insistence on God's reality, the writer balked. Now, Kamenetz realizes that his "absence of connection I felt to God-- the beeper out of range-- is itself an essential element of the communication." (197)

So, while the first couple hundred pages of this narrative moved fitfully and to me erratically as Kamenetz delves deeper into his own troubled relationship with a personal God that he finds lacking in his own experience, learning from Jonathan Omer-Man, and then Green, he stumbles closer to entering the "sha'ar harachamim," the "gates of mercy," by his own chance encounter with a nameless Israeli, the Elijah figure he cannot stalk but who will find him when least expected: when Kamenetz returns five years after his 1990 visit to the Dalai Lama, in his Indian exile in Dharamasala. While there's no grand epiphany, the book gradually tapers off with an account of how Kamenetz interpreted the seder ritual for Tibetans there, and continues the first book's groundbreaking attempt to instruct one people in exile by another, how to survive and endure and continue their practice.

There's plenty of ideas to reflect upon in a wandering account that appropriately finds Kamenetz at one point screaming by the side of the freeway and then finding solace in his own mini-desert exodus. Much of this book might have worked more as shorter essays, although themes build bit by bit, if not always followed through. This mimics the author's own trek, but it may frustrate readers wanting a neat resolution to what must be a honest teller's rambling tale that cannot end so neatly.

Throughout, Kamenetz and his fellow seekers urge more silence, less talk. More peace, less anger. These are not easy for Jewish people used to wrangling and debate, as he admits readily. Yet, inspired by his Buddhist-grounded understanding of insight, Kamenetz begins to apply this to a more communally based Jewish outreach. As he meets Green, he wonders: "how can I connect this being, who escapes language, with the very concrete stories of the Jewish people? It was harnessing a soap bubble and hoping to rise to heaven." (246)
(Posted today to Amazon US & my blog; see author's website.)

David Chadwick's "Crooked Cucumber: The Life & Zen Teachings of Shunryu Suzuki": Book Review

Few books about Zen near 400 pages; this balances Suzuki's unpublished reflections deftly with an in-depth, but briskly told and slyly affectionate biography by an early American follower. At 55, in 1959, Suzuki left Japan to fulfill his dream of spreading Zen in America. His success in founding the San Francisco Zen Center came just as Westerners began to seek out a Zen master; Tassajara retreat also proved well-timed with the rise of the hippies in the mid-60s. Chadwick, who joined Suzuki's circle in 1966, adds a personal touch to the saga that enlivens the tale.

The first half of the book precisely stays in Japan; the subject's called here "Shunryu." Nicknamed "Crooked Cucumber," he was raised within the rather moribund tradition, following his father as a priest. In 1924, he has an early epiphany while in a market as he looks at the tawdry merchandise readied for export: he wonders why the best of Japan, its Zen teaching, cannot instead be sent abroad. Learning English, quietly asserting the ways of peace within a frenzied patriotic regime, surviving the hardships of WWII and its aftermath that included the murder of his first wife at the hands of a demented monk, Suzuki struggles against the tired systems of monastics, bureaucrats, and politicians in his own modest way.

Chadwick is not a showy writer, and as with many who practice Zen his prose stays simple and steady. As one who'd previously written about his an "American Zen failure in Japan," this volume benefits by his careful context that shows readers unfamiliar (as I am) with Japanese culture and Zen terminology employed over 1500 years of tradition. (No index, but a glossary helps and all terms are introduced within the text smoothly.) You may not learn as much about Zen itself as abstract, but here it is dramatized-- by its embodiment within one of its foremost practitioners. I never thought four hundred pages of such a life would prove engrossing. I was wrong.

By interspersing Suzuki's own unpublished recollections and correspondence within the follower's recounting of his life, you gradually learn how Suzuki's mind worked, and how his low-key appeal might have effected those who met his penetrating gaze, under what seems in photos a left eyebrow quizzically raised a fraction. He battled anger and impatience, and in his outbursts one recognizes a frailty beneath what may have often been a rather imperious mien. Still, deep down there's a still center that calms us. Chadwick pauses to convey his last glimpse of his homeland in 1959.

"As the western sky turned pink in Yaizu on May 21, Shunryu stood by his pond in the chilly morning. He had concluded his last morning service at Rinso-in. Carp swam in the murky water as tadpoles darted about. Goodbye to the big living stone, now covered in moss. Goodbye to the frogs. As the rays of the sun struck the bamboo on the hill, the air heated quickly, and the stalks expanded, emitting sharp, pinging noises of different pitches, a strange little song of farewell in the still morning." (161)

Such passages, filtering Suzuki's own perspective, dramatize well how he saw the world he loved so well even as he strove to separate himself from attachments to its beauties.

Without comment, "Suzuki" replaces "Shunryu" as he arrives in the converted synagogue that comprised Sokoji, the temple he took over in San Francisco. Soon, Americans sought him out for 'zazen' and his reputation grew. This led to tension with the Japanese American immigrant congregation, and the Zen Center took over a Jewish women's residence for its own growing needs. Tassajara followed, Suzuki shared a dais at a Be-In in Golden Gate Park, and his transcribed talks as "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" led to his own minor celebrity within the counterculture.

Yet, unlike his own American-born successor, Suzuki avoided scandal. His practice as it had all his life remained modest; he stayed humble. He lived austerely and with grace (except for a temper, and even then one feels that Suzuki knew he was half-serious, half-playacting). He stepped away from the limelight, showing by example. As conveyed through Chadwick's narrative of an early adept: "All he had to do was face the wall and follow his breath-- no faith, nothing to hold on to, just the nagging question to solve for himself under the guidance of this marvelous, dignified little man." (209) Or, later as at Tassajara, Chadwick tells of their daily regimen. "It was waiting patiently like a hunter, not moving for hours." (287)

Who would find such a routine appealing? Chadwick introduces those who gathered around Suzuki, and their brief stories enrich the milieu recreated by one who had been there early on. The doctrine they learned emerges slowly, as it may have been for a seeker, and while largely clear of philosophy per se, Chadwick does take care in elucidating the teaching. "Things-as-they-are" link to the multiplicity, the seeming solidity, the realm of forms we see around us; "things-as-it-is" refers to the underlying, often unseen or ignored level of oneness, that beyond the empirical, that emptiness sought by Buddhists in meditation. The "first principle" might be buddha-nature, absolutes, God, the Tao, truth, reality or simply what "I don't know"; the "second principle" becomes all the rules, dharma-teaching, explanations and interpretations we build up as we try to understand the ultimately inexplicable.

Shifting ancient methods of seeking such wisdom into Western terms proved challenging. "Establishing Buddhism in a new country is like holding a plant to a stone and wanting it to take root," Suzuki mused. (252) Still, realizing his life's dream, he loved sharing what he knew by decades of training. He could be unpredictable. The FBI investigating Tassajara's sponsorship of conscientious objectors found that Suzuki fit in with pacifist and Quaker terms of resistance, but he then told them that his son was serving in Vietnam. Suzuki expounded on karma with the caution that many antiwar demonstrators "talk about peace in some angry mood, when actually you are creating war with that angry mood." (317) As with many Buddhists, he sought to change the way people acted with one another once they got off their meditation cushions. He strove to eliminate the root causes of war that even peaceniks might carry within themselves to the detriment of all around them.

By such nuances, Suzuki emerges as a tolerant, admirable man. He eschewed dogmatism, insisting that "not always so" remain the touchstone for testing theory against practice. He comforted a woman who transcribed his talks as she died of cancer, recognizing the "buddha-nature" within her poignantly. At 67, when he was himself dying of cancer, he rejoiced that at least it was not hepatitis, and he could eat whatever he wanted. Even as he was dying, Suzuki told Chadwick about his concern for taking care of guests at Tassajara and for Chadwick to pursue scholarship that would keep himself out of trouble and "express my true nature." It appears that his master's advice paid off. Chadwick directly but effectively transmits the dignity and compassion that his role model demonstrated. He does not avoid his failings, but he does emphasize his strengths, which far outnumbered his shortcomings.(Posted to Amazon US 7-6-09 and my blog 7-9. Author's website: "Cuke.com". See also my recent blog post and Amazon US review of Kaoru Nonomura's "Eat Sit Sleep: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple.")

Stephane Grenier's "Blog Blazers": Book Review

Interviews with 40 bloggers reveal many similarities. They advise you to keep pace, write well, and promote yourself. 90% of the discussions are by marketers, software developers, and financial gurus, so this book will benefit professionals more than amateurs. However, as the latter, even I learned a lot.

Only one interviewee likes my Fionnchu-dot-Blogspot-dot-com as "Blogtrotter" host, Google's e-Blogger, for example; while WordPress is favored by a few for its plug-ins, most respondents lament that they did not start blogging under their own domain name. This reliance on Blogspot or WordPress may separate we amateur bloggers from the pros. They tend to dismiss "free" or "hosted" blogging sites. Unsurprisingly, they like us hate annoying ads, although most monetize, with varying degrees of success from a six-figure income to apparently not enough to pay for a video game with gift certificates earned from Amazon Affiliates.

Stephane Grenier asks each blogger what to read when learning about blogging. Darren Rowse's ProBlogger site overwhelmingly earns acclaim, with the book "Naked Conversations" and text "Cluetrain Manifesto" also frequently mentioned. Many bloggers, however, tend to dive in and link and comment on other blogs, forums, social networks, and websites. (Twitter is mentioned by only one person, however, and I failed to see Facebook's potential explored pro or con as it might have deserved.) Pursuing SEO (Search Engine Optimization: terms lack a glossary and this may baffle the newcomer that this book's intended to assist) remains a holy grail; pros scrutinize Google Analytics and stoke FeedBurner, being tech-savvier than the common web visitor, perhaps, and most know how to tweak network systems. They point you to sites and widgets, blogs and examples, throughout the text, but I suspect some of these may overwhelm newcomers.

As to writing, Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style" keeps its favored status as an exemplar even among technorati. Pacing one's self as a writer, they urge, will gradually pay off in readers. Most post daily; some especially in the software and marketing fields encourage five daily posts, however brief. They all warn of the burnout that traps most novices into abandoning their efforts far too soon. Stephane tells himself and us in his own interview to avoid negative, scathing comments about others, and to concentrate upon asserting your own opinion rather than parroting other content done better by bloggers more famous.

One must build one's reputation with what one knows best. Instead of commenting on other content, they counsel you to mainly write about what inspires you. Not the cat, the girlfriend, or your own life, however. "Added value" may be our decade's buzzword, but it's good advice.

Headlines draw attention, as many RSS feeds and search engines have barely more than this to dangle before the eyes of a potential visitor to one's blog. Pictorial elements, crediting other sites, and an attractive layout encourage the passerby, skimming the screen, to linger and become a regular customer, or a friend. Short paragraphs, bullet points, and catchy leads transfer journalistic trademarks to the DIY industry that has become, for 70 million blogs, a crowded field where less than one percent generate sufficient traffic, revenues, and word-of-mouth to sustain themselves. Even among these successful bloggers, nearly none make a living off blogs alone. They may, given the preponderance of financial wizards, not be satisfied with a modest income, on the other hand!

Key term matches tempt a reader further, and scannability as opposed to in-depth reading must also be elemental when creating an appealing entry. While the social networking aspect per se seems underexamined, StumbleUpon and cross-currents that flow from one entity to the other on the Net appear to be quite the norm for most bloggers here. No graphics are given, so the reader might want to visit the blogs mentioned, of course, to see how successful bloggers integrate words with graphics.

The book reads briskly, with a welcome index, but I would recommend pausing after a few interviews. They tend to run together otherwise, and you will see "ProBlogger" over and over. Given the stress by bloggers here to polish one's prose, quite a few typos remain, but these may have been silently "unedited" by Grenier, as with capturing Manolo Blahnik shoe-magnate's unique style of expression. The ESL did throw me off here, and I wondered why it was given in this manner without editorial comment. Perhaps the questions might have, after an initial exposition, been reduced to avoid repetition, as they are asked of each interviewer and after forty times, they do tire the "scanning reader." However, even if alphabetized by first rather than last name, the transcripts do manage to get the feel of a personality across now and then which speaks well for that blogger's own sense of style on his or her blog.

Steph interviews himself among the success stories, as Stephane, as well as 39 others. His own comments compare blogging to a New Year's resolution. Most give up after feeling ignored by the lack of readers or customers. He and his colleagues show how the one-percent of bloggers might include you. (Posted to my blog and Amazon US 7-7-09.)

David Fontana's "Discover Zen": Book Review

This is the first book I read entirely on Zen; spareness and simple presentation of profound complexity characterize such introductions. The book at first glance looks too brief, but Nelly Dimitranova's illustrations enhance this entry in the Chronicle Books series geared, admittedly, at a New Age or spirituality centered readership. David Fontana, however, transcends the limitations of 160 pages with abundant pictures and short text to give a solid, thoughtful, and encouraging overview of this often misunderstood concept, in definition and practice.

Previous Amazon reviewers have been kind but often generalized in their responses. (See my comments appended to the leading review by "a customer" to correct the reviewer's interpretation of how Fontana regards "progress" and the story of the Bodhidharma staring at the wall for nine years.) So, a fuller review's necessary.

Chapter One gives "the Nature of Zen." The immediacy of experience through exercises (29 appear) throughout the text gradually emerges as one progresses. I was a skeptic, but after about six weeks spent slowly trying out many of these, and reading a few pages at a time, often over and over spread out over a few days, the points sink in subtly when put to use. A psychologist, Dr. Fontana tells that "we develop a sense of recognition, of familiarity, as if we are being reminded of something we have always known, but have long forgotten." As with "a wise and compassionate friend," Zen brings us to meet "none other than our own true nature" as that friend. (13) This may terrify or confuse or dishearten us at first.

Therefore, the exercises and commentaries draw us away from our ego to move beyond what might be caricatured as navel-gazing. Chapter Two gets one looking at the "Zen Vision" in nature and actions before Chapter Three, which by "Entering the Path" starts to illustrate formal meditation by "Entering the Path." Mindfulness, and meeting one's own mind, begin to be explained. While the posture information remained rather unclear in specifics, such guidance can be easily found elsewhere.

"Walking On," as Chapter Four, delves into "form is emptiness, emptiness is form," and how monks employ paradox and the koan. Although this book may be more from the Soto tradition in its "zazen" sitting emphasis, plenty of Rinzai-influenced koans can be found here and in Chapter Five, "Completing the Circle," to keep one thinking or not-thinking for plenty of lifetimes. The ten drawings from twelfth-century Chinese master Kakuan, on ox-herding, complete the book with a handsome pairing of text and illustrations that dramatize the journey to find one's purpose in life.

Fontana throughout, as with the best Zen teachers, keeps a calm, slightly wry or insistent, tone that stays free of jargon; the few terms can be found in the glossary along with a short reading list. "Remember that Zen is 'your ordinary, everyday life' lived reflectively: there are no schedules or timetables, and the way forward is simply to look around you, see where you are, and move on." (97) This remains a serene, but not naive or simple-minded, introduction.

Anybody, Fontana shows, can benefit from this non-theistic discipline. It's not based on salvation, but liberation "from our misguided way of seeing the world," so by accepting impermanence we can understand how "our natural state is free from suffering." He cautions: "This is not a woolly claim that everything will be fine if only we can convince ourselves so; it is an invitation to look and decide for ourselves." (130) Both the Buddha's invitation to test the message he preached before accepting it, and Christ's "the truth shall make you free" cited by Fontana apply well here to the quest of learning to listen to one's informed and composed self in seeking peace and sharing wisdom. This is a long process, not a quick fix.

Fontana, in such lessons, widens the appeal for this book to Christians and those who may hesitate to take on its philosophy. He sums it up as resolving our greatest "koan": that of the meaning of our own life. "Life itself is the ultimate koan." (130) We might not reach enlightenment in this life, but this "is less important than the fact the human mind is not only capable of attaining it, but also able to recognize this state as its natural way of being." (153)

In the end, practice makes perhaps not rapid perfection, but a realization that we can help others get calmer only after starting to calm ourselves. So, by sitting steadily and practicing diligently, "we can come closer to what life, in its fullness and completeness, its difficulties and obstacles, is trying to tell us." (134) And we hear this clearest in daily silence. (Posted to Amazon US and my blog 7-4-2009)

Iliya Troyanov's "The Collector of Worlds": Book Review

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-90) remains famous today for reporting from Mecca, learning Asian, Arabic and African languages, spying as a native, and "discovering" Lake Victoria as the White Nile's source. His "Kama Sutra" translation made him famous; his widow's burning of his erotica after his death made her infamous. A Bulgarian-born traveller among many of the lands Burton explored, Troyanov wrote this novel in German; William Hobson's translation appears nearly seamless. However, the novel tends towards more matter-of-fact recitals of what Burton and his peers saw, felt, thought, and endured; how much of this tone can be accounted for in the original vs. the rendering I've read I cannot ascertain. It does give a somewhat more reticent, oblique perspective than readers of such a bold man may expect given the fictional potential.

The strengths of this tripartite narrative lie in Troyanov's sympathies with his predecessor. He distances himself from the mercurial, enigmatic Burton. He filters his thoughts through a mixture of obliquely observed, indirect first-person and mostly third-person informants who tell their tales about Burton to other listeners. Troyanov layers his story well; the stories add up and cloak Burton in more intrigue.

The first is told by Burton's assistant in India for eight years to a scribe employed to create a letter of reference. Burton here arrives, sours on the military, and makes himself useful as a spy due to his chameleon-like abilities. The relevance of Hindu-Muslim tensions applies well to his age and to ours.

Second, Burton enters Mecca, having been circumcised. Whether or not he's a real Muslim remains vague; Troyanov filters the uncertainty of an Englishman and how far he can claim, inside himself, to have gone native when it comes not to his tongue or his appearance but his soul. Where do his loyalties lie? The efforts of a team of high-level officials overseeing the governance of Mecca, as they interview and then interrogate those with whom Burton acted on his pilgrimage, or "hajj," again testify to the currency of their debate. Who will control the Arab holy cities? Will the Wahhabi take over with their zealotry, or will the Turks practice a more benign rule in league with the Western powers circling closer to the Middle East?

Finally, a rather ingenious if sensible chain of interpreters brings Burton and his sometime partner, then rival John Hanning Speke into the deserts, swamps, and wastelands of Africa. The narrative here enlivens and the teller, Sidi Mubarak Bombay, starts with showing how Burton's relied on a former slave who was taken from East Africa to India, therefore learning Hindustani, and then having Burton use him as a guide to parlay with natives as they-- with a hundred and twenty guards and bearers-- seek the source of the Nile and the mystery of the Mountains of the Moon. There's a softness here and a heightened drama that makes this the most satisfying of the three main sections.

In retrospect, the power of the novel rests more in the old-fashioned tension of its subject and the wonders he sees and the torments he finds. Most of the novel moves well, never flagging given the primary sources must lie in Burton's own work. It's not a flashy work, but a solid, steadily paced read, like its subject, who never turns back from filling in the white places on the map, much as this determination confounds everyone around him, no matter where he goes and whose persona he assumes. Inside, he stays ultimately a mystery, and even this novel cannot penetrate his disguises. This may confound some readers today wanting a tidy psychoanalytical or post-colonial explanation of what makes Burton tick inside. It may frustrate audiences today, but it refuses to offer any more rationales than those around Burton can imagine, in Troyanov's many-layered, intricately structured narratives.

The horrors of slavery and the attack of a mudslide on Burton and Speke's camp make the latter portion of the tale most memorable. The Indian section's standout part comes with how it shows Burton infiltrating himself within plotters as a merchant; similarly, the Meccan pilgrimage features the novel's single most philosophical vignette. It comes out of Burton's unease after he circles the Kaaba in Mecca: "If every person were closer to you, who would you care for, who would you suffer with? Man's heart is a receptacle of finite capacity, whereas the divine is an infinite principle." (273)

I give Burton's encounter later on the hajj, at the stoning of Satan at the pillars in the Valley of Mina, here as a taste of the flavor of this satisfying book's highlight. The pilgrims, after throwing their seven pebbles at the stones symbolizing the Evil One, shove and try to get out of the way of the other pilgrims who must throw their pebbles at the stones-- and who hit the crowds ahead of them, nearer the stones. Burton finds that this ritual's "an exercise in the all too human. Everyone approached the devil within; the pilgrims' hearts were turned to stone again, and so there was no mistake the pebbles should hit the pilgrims. Quite the opposite: in their fellow men they hit the Devil, not the column he had put there as a distraction." (292)

Burton realizes that after their perpetual motion of devotion at the Kaaba, he's entered the pilgrims' swirl at Mina of unceasing violence. Here, "at the heart of Islam," he recalls the words of his Hindu mentor: "as long as we see our fellow men simply as other people, we will never stop hurting them. Seen from this perspective, the Devil was in the differences people created between each other. A jet of saliva landing on his face confirmed the thought." (Posted to Amazon US 5-30-09.)

Oighear os cionn an gaineamhlacht

Chaith muid dhá oíche ina Foinsí na Pailme. Iarr muid ag imeacht. Bhain sult as leathanta saoire beag againnsa.

Ní maith liom an te, ar ndóigh. Mar sin féin, is maith liom ag feiceáil an diseart. Is cuimhne liom an ghrian ag dealramh ar na beanna lom.

Is ábalta tú ag fáil an cnóc mór ar mo bhlog anseo, mar shampla. Thug mé an ghriangraf de ár fuinneoig óstlainne. Fhiafraigh mé faoi an dath dó chuige mo theaglach. Níl mé ábalta ag rá focal ceart dó.

Dúirt Leon orm: "Is cosúil sé donnbhuí. Is ag dul i gcosúlacht le briosca milese leis sceallóga sheacláide." Níl fhíos agam an focal go direach faoi dealramh deannachúil as Béarla.

Aontaím leis mo mhac is sine. Bhí an dubh-iontas orm nuair a chonaic sliabh eile in aice leis an ionad saoire cáiliúil ann. Is sí níos airde ann.

Chonaic mé leac oighir in ard an tsléibhte. In ard an lae, i measc na tsamraidh, tá dhá fána ghéar leis pócaí bídeach leis slisní oighir is airde os cionn na trá ghainimh. Bhí céad céim teochta suas go direach nuair ag tiománta ar an bóthar mór a feadh an bealach abhaile an ceathrú lá san Iúil ann.

Ice above the sandy desert.

We spent two nights in Palm Springs. We wanted to get away. We enjoyed a little holiday ourselves.

The heat does not please me, of course. All the same, to see the desert gives me pleasure. In my memory the sun's shining on the barren peaks.

You are able to find the great hill on my blog here, for example. I took this photo from our hotel window. I asked about the color of it to my family. I was not able to say the right word for it.

Leo said to me: "It's like a biscuit-color. It's resembling a sweet-biscuit [cookie] with chips of chocolate." I don't know the exact word for this dusty sheen in English.

I agree with my elder son. I was astonished when seeing another steep slope near this famous holiday resort. It is much higher.

I saw icy cliff-faces at the highest point on the mountain. At the height of the day, in the middle of summer, there's two steep slopes with tiny pockets of icy slices the highest up above the sandy shores. It was a hundred degrees exactly below when we drove along the highway there on the homeward journey on the Fourth of July.

Jeffery Paine's "Re-Enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West": Book Review

"When the story is told in these pages began, had most Americans tried to locate Tibet on a map, they would have pockmarked half the globe with bad-guess pinpricks. By the time the story ends, some Hollywood stars know more about Tibetan Buddhism than the Dalai Lama does-- or at least they act that way." Paine's wry sideswipe at Steven Seagal shows the wit and tone of this thoughtful-- if erratically edited-- introduction to a subject that will likely leave you craving more insight.

Paine takes us through not so much the tenets of Tibetan Buddhism, described by Alan Watts as "Roman Catholicism on acid"; the appeal in the West of what's surpassed Zen since Watts & the Beats lies in its panoply of approaches towards wisdom, its exotic teachings, and its colorful characters. As Paine in his best chapter, on the Dalai Lama's appeal to live with utmost conviction yet astonishing flexibility, shows us, most Tibetans despite their escape from the horrors of decimation seem-- unlike so many presenters of religious doctrine-- to be enjoying themselves amidst their substitution of dogma or dictate with philosophical ambiguity, non-theistic contemplation, unpredictable practices, and creative props that both represent and deny the ultimate existence of gods. Not taking themselves seriously, the Tibetan lamas teach us, he displays in case studies of teachers and students, how to approach our life with the sense it's a game, played that comes and goes perpetually beyond the brief brackets of our birth and death in our present form.

"With its compact emphasis on individual meditation, Buddhism may fit the overpopulated" century as "it can accomodate itself and take up less space." (136-7) He wonders if more people sought diminishment of goods, more people might "possess an 'overabundance' of food and housing." Many in these pages dream of a transformed world through ethical principles based in Buddhism that others may incorporate, if free of the panoply that surrounds Tibetan versions of its teachings. Paine defines universality, individual responsibility, and heightened capabilities for personal growth turned social improvement as three civilizing features the dharma can share with other religions and moral systems.

Certainly, the appeal of a self-generated, yet outwardly directed, way of life that avoids fruitless fretting about salvation, eternity, and sin may be timed for our times better than Vedanta was for Christopher Isherwood's Hollywood, or even Zen, Paine hints, for its countercultural adoption. This issue deserved far more depth, but Paine does touch on essential points. He wonders if religions would improve by being more contradictory, communal vs. individual, mystical vs. practical, angelic or unadorned, "flinty" or "firm," as they adapt to a human nature more akin to Buddhist notions of impermanence, the unknowable, and the evanescent that underlies the illusion of relative, conventional "reality" as a transcendent, perpetual state.

These ideas burrow into the text, more in its latter chapters. He begins with Thomas Merton's in retrospect still-naive pilgrimage, when the Dalai Lama was little known by most in 1968. Harold Talbott, whose own journey from Fifth Avenue scion to Buddhist scholar gains attention later on as one of three case studies, served as Merton's go-between. Paine gives a solid overview of what in the anthology "Merton & Buddhism" more recently has gained needed scrutiny by scholars. Tibet's context within Western imperialism follows, with French explorer and writer Alexandra David-Neel's long life (1868-1969) spanning the cultural shift from fabled Shangri-La to hippie destination, if one no less exotic in the eyes of typical Westerners.

The romanticization, decried later by Patrick French in "Tibet, Tibet," and the adulation of the Dalai Lama, have long been present in the West. The difference is now, unlike when Diane Perry grew up in the 1950s in London, millions know now what few knew only in fragments, as Merton did, given the lack of communication with the West by lamas who had not yet gained Western followings until around 1970. Thubten Geshe and then notoriously Chögyam Trungpa spearheaded the British and American popularity of Tibetan lore. Paine's ability to get inside the minds of both teachers and students shows him at his best as a writer and interpreter throughout the book.

Trungpa, he suggests, soon figured out that Westerners could be jumpstarted into higher-level teaching than customary in Tibetan monasteries. Inspired by Shunryu Suzuki's similar shifts when he brought Zen to San Francisco earlier, Trungpa decided to shift into higher gear. Paine explains: "Meditation is so empty of content that it's hard to turn it into spiritual materialism or appropriate it for egotistical purposes." (93) For newcomers, who had lost "the principles of sacredness," Trungpa reduced the dharma to a secular-friendly core; for those who wanted to restore the Tibetan brocades, visualizations and enthronements commenced.

Therefore (as the uncredited Fields narrates in his history), Tibetan monastic practices began to be transferred outside their origins. By the 1990s as the process advanced, Alyce Neoli/ Catherine Burroughs emerged as a "tulku" of a reincarnated female "lama" chosen by the same Penor Rinpoche who later "recognized" Seagal-- after a few donations were made. The uncredited Kamenetz records that when the rabbis found out about how a "tulku" was found, they wondered: what if the lama makes a mistake? I wondered this too, when reading Martha Sherrill's "The Buddha from Brooklyn" about Alyce who became Jetsunma; Paine takes a sympathetic tone towards her, noting Tenzin Palmo's conclusion after reading Sherrill: "her follies are such the way such a being would behave," as recounted by Sherrill, "if he or she lacked the proper training." (158) Tenzin should know, as a girl attracted to a teaching she could not even define as Buddhist, so little being known then about Tibetan dharma by all but a few scholars from a few glimpses such as David-Neel's.

Tenzin Palmo's transformation's amazing; born a Cockney fishmonger's daughter Diane Perry when nobody born humble in postwar Britain knew of such teachings, ordained in 1964 as one of the first Western nuns, she later spent twelve years as a hermit in a cave 13,200 feet high in Ladakh, and then returning from her harrowing yet inspiring story to found a nunnery. David-Neel saw Buddhism from the outside; Perry became Tenzin to enter it.

The widening attraction of hitherto inaccessible teachings from a remote land rippled out from the hippies to the celebrities and by films. Not only explicitly about Tibet as in the 1990s, but filtered through "The Matrix" and "Jacob's Ladder," the bardo dramatized for everyday folks. The fact I don't explain that term speaks for the rapid spread over a generation of a thousand-year-old, isolated, esoteric science of the mind into popular culture, as if a medieval monk found himself lauded in Manhattan.

This may be a fad, or it may be a genuine sign of shift: Robert Thurman argues the latter, while Jean-Francois Revel & Mathieu Ricard ("The Monk & The Philosopher" 1996) James William Coleman in "The New Buddhists" (2001, neither work cited here) examines the appeal of Buddhism for many intellectual elites in the West; the teachings he finds have not trickled down yet. Pankraj Mishra from the Indian p-o-v also wonders about Buddha vs. Nietzsche at length in "An End to Suffering" (2004). Paine favors Shakespeare, Henry and William James as his references, well-employed if hard for an eager reader to track back-- more later about this shortcoming.

Paine, considering music and film, seems to feel the dharma's widening, but I wonder about the permanence of its impacts. De Tocqueville noted the American withdrawal from "delineation of the soul to fix exclusively on that of the body, and they substitute the representation of motion and sensation with that of sentiment and thought."

Daringly, Paine then links this prescient observation to Buddhism, which as with film uses projection to record sensory experiences and motion while leaving the soul's mysteries intangible. "Hollywood calls the illusions it makes from bodies, sensation, and motion 'cinema.' Buddhism calls the illusions made from them 'conventional reality.'" Paine provides a novel image when recounting how cinema and Tibetan Buddhism are both roughly a century old in their Western transmissions: "In both a movie and Buddhism, 'reality' is palpably, sensuously before us, making us laugh one moment and cry the next, but then vanishing insubstantially when the projectionist (or, in Buddhism, our projection) flicks off the switch." (179)

Paine again excites the reader by his ability to convey the wonder: he juxtaposes Talbott's Gatsby-esque tale of reinvention. Here, as with "tonglin" and "ngondro" and "chöd" Paine illustrates Tibetan terms deftly. "Our usual mental states are like the audience in a theater that gets caught up in the drama that unfolds." Contrast this with the emptiness and luminosity registered by Tibetans at this high stage. The state of play demanded as in quantum physics demands Talbott as a "dzogchen" practitioner abandon "reality" as it seems solid to our senses, for a mind so trained "resembles the playwright who exults in the creative play with which he maneuvers his imaginary puppets."(221)

His next case: a (psuedonymous to protect her reputation) Princeton "postdeconstructionist" feminist mid-life wonders about the appeal her tentative forays into Tibetan practice and reading reveal. A literary critic such as herself, Paine relates, follows a long path of scholarship most of her career, with "few genuine knock-you-off-your-chair discoveries left to be made." Tibetan Buddhism provides "Christine" with "her ticket into the unknown," after idly finding used at the Strand Bookstore Sogyal Rinpoche's influential "Tibetan Book of Living and Dying." Yet, her colleagues, disdainful of any belief, may belittle her quest, so she pursues it in the morning at home, gingerly but with increasing fascination.

San Quentin's death row houses the final American turned Tibetan student, if at a distance behind bars. Jarvis Masters contemplates karma, impermanence, and mindfulness as translated into taking responsibility for one's actions, accepting how reality itself changes during one's sentence as faced with honesty, and how one must faced with one's term should cultivate an awareness to embrace not endure the present situation. As with Alyce Zeoli or Diane Perry in their ignorance of Buddhism constructed before their exposure to it a homespun notion of its dharma independently and even intuitively, so in prison, Paine considers, such stories "from both the sickbed and prison cell, indirectly support Buddhism's claim that it is not a religion but something that occurs 'in life'-- not a man-made, synthetic medicine but a plant with healing properties that grows of itself." (251)

The narrative concludes on such graceful notes. Still, the story needed more unfolding, given that Paine admits seven years' labor on its contents. Intended for the general reader, so lacking by his design footnotes or works cited, this superficially but persistently disappoints in its scattershot mention of many who've preceded Paine; Paine assures their books can be readily found, but his decision to eschew documentation makes this an uneven book, riddled with typos. W.Y. Evans-"Wenz" repeats, "Llasa" alternates with "Lhasa." "Arbie's" and "Guiness" appear; Stephen and Martine separately are surnamed "Bachelor" while "Into the Wild" is attributed to "John" Krakauer. The lack of credit given such as Rodger Kamenetz' "The Jew in the Lotus," the 1994 account of the 1990 visit by rabbis to Dharamsala, proves odd; Rick Fields' pioneering 1992 "How the Swans Came to the Lake" may also be familiar to readers already, but why not mention these popular and enduring predecessors that showed many Americans (as they did me) perhaps their first glimpses into Tibetan Buddhism?

These persistent shortcomings noted, the strength in Paine's narrative lies in his metaphorical mind. As he struggles, for instance, to match the mansion yearned for in Christian mentalities of the afterlife with the adding on of another room in a modern mind making room for hitherto unknown Tibetan dharma, he falters. But, he more often succeeds.

(P.S. I've reviewed Coleman, French, "Merton and Buddhism," Kamenetz, Mishra, Revel & Ricard, and Sherrill on Amazon U.S. and all but French's book also very recently on my "Blogtrotter." The review above's posted at Amazon 6/28/2009; cross-posted then to my blog for longer reviews also, "Not the L.A. Times Book Review.")

Rodger Kamenetz' "The Jew in the Lotus": Book Review

Rereading this fifteen years after it was published, I found it poignant and thoughtful. In '94, I'd known about Judaism but not Buddhism; now studying the latter while building upon a lifelong interest in Tibet, I realize how Kamenetz deftly moves between his secular American Jewish perspective and a 1990 encounter superficially utterly opposed to shul and shetl and shuckling. But, as he carefully delineates, both essentially different and ultimately united. This conclusion sounds facile, but he explores the fraught intersection where so many Jews have left their upbringing to find fuller lives within Buddhism, and this tension adds heft and relevance to what might have been in less-skilled hands a romanticized or castigating report.

The moral that animosity does not foster equanimity between foes early on divides Tibetan ability to see in their enemies a fellow sufferer deserving compassion from Jewish determination to pursue justice and never to forget Amalek or Hitler. I expected more about explicitly, in post-Holocaust debate, about this fundamental outlook permeating the rabbis who constituted the core of the entourage visiting the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala exile. But, exile being the key problem, the challenge may be less to recover past atrocities than to perpetuate present peace, promote future harmony, and to move wherever possible Tibetan treasures of wisdom to safety outside their tormented homeland, which has only worsened twenty years after this dialogue.

Tibet's wealth's compared to an archeological dig in Israel; from much that Jews barely understand today, they can retrieve parallel meditation and renewal practices that can appeal to disenchanted Jews tired of dull synagogues and rote ritual. For instance, the kabbalistic "ain sof" (no limit) concept meshes with "shunyata" (emptiness). The Star of David and tantric fertility symbols share a Mesopotamian inspiration as a venerable icon. "God is an atheist," renewal rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi reflects, for unlike the open space sought in Buddhism, perhaps Judaism at its core captures a lonely Creator "because God has no peer, God has no God" before Him for comfort. (251) This, ironically perhaps, becomes an emanation the writer, a poet-professor, can relate to best after a lifetime's search never expressed so.

Following ancient prophets appeals less to some Jewish-born seekers than discovering spirituality for one's self directly by dharma-doing. In transfer, neat comparisons may be lacking. The motif of the home and family that stands for Jewish continuity for the Tibetan lacks equivalence: the monastery and the celibate dominates. Yet, the joy many JUBUs (Jewish Buddhists being vastly overrepresented in those turning to dharma practice) find when leaving home and shul speaks to the profound lack of meaning many find, as Ram Dass (Hindu priest studying Hasidism, born to a prominent Jewish family as Richard Alpert) reminds Kamenetz, only outside their birth family and upbringing, for like family, one's born-religion may push a sensitive spirit's "buttons."

Interviewing malcontents like Allen Ginsberg and more composed JUBU leaders, the author finds that many of them early did not reject Judaism truly, as many were assimilated already within families who had left Orthodoxy generations ago. This is one issue that, interspersed awkwardly within a narrative that skips from October 1990 in India to later talks with JUBUs, does throw off the pace. Later chapters depart from the Dharamsala meetings to Kamenetz' valuable thoughts on Jewish-Buddhist relations outside Tibet. The book gains intensity in these closing sections, as the author faces his own enthusiasm and ambivalence and hope. (He followed this book with more journeys among Jewish mystics in "Stalking Elijah": now he's taken by studies of dreams.)

The trick becomes how to share within Judaism the vibrancy many find outside of it in dharma. And, as the Dalai Lama carefully reminds the rabbis, not to fret if some leave the fold to find inspiration. For the Jews, however, some rail at this, given the numerical impact of so many bright people leaving a diminishing population within the tribe. 30% of Jews died in the Shoah; but over 80% of rabbis were murdered who could have transmitted advanced teachings similar to Tibetan techniques that Shachter boldly struggles to pass on in compatible if countercultural form to open-minded Jews who like dharma, as one of the few teachers remaining from before the war from Eastern Europe.

So, rather than losing Jews to dharma, Kamenetz and his peers seek to inspire Jews to incorporate similar teachings into their own American lives. In exile from Jerusalem historically, the rabbis shifted from Temple sacrifice to school learning in Yavneh; Dharamsala may represent the same opportunity to make rebirth after the Chinese destruction of nearly all six thousand monasteries with a thousand years of accumulated knowledge preserved by Tibetan monks.

There's a necessity to never forget such horrors, but the Buddhists differ from the Jews crucially when it comes to how best remember them. Tibetans seem to favor, at least under the Dalai Lama's fraught diplomatic balance, to forgive rather than to take revenge: they warn that the Jews may raise up more trouble by not letting go of anger. Is anger justifiable? Is the Jewish tendency to argue and wrangle, whether over family issues, ideas, or Torah, commendable? Kamenetz considers tough questions.

He finds when meeting the Dalai Lama that, contrary to his suspicions of idolatry, the monk provides him an instant, sharp glimpse into the "quiet mind." Kamenetz welcomes this lesson, transmitted as if intuitively into the troubled soul of a disaffiliated Jew who's never found contentment in his cultural identity so much as contention. It took, he considers, three hundred years for the teachings of the Buddha to take root in other Asian countries. "It may be well that Buddhism may borrow a few dance steps from Judaism along the way" for the process may not be as one-sided as outsiders assume. Jews return to Torah too after Tibet, and in this circular pattern Kamenetz finds that their dialogue may strengthen all who meet.

(P.S. Those wanting more about Westerners talking with the Dalai Lama about Tibet may among an ever-expanding series of books find my Amazon US & blog reviews of Thomas Laird's "Tibet: A History" and Pico Iyer's "The Open Road" helpful. Review posted 6-26-2009 to Amazon US.)

Image: the hardcover's art's much better than the paperback! You can link from the author's website "here" to clips from Laurel Chiten's 1999 PBS film adaptation, which I'd never heard of until now.

Aravind Adiga's "Between the Assassinations": Book Review

1984-1991, between Indira & Rajiv Gandhi's murders, these stories tell of an Indian coastal city's impoverished, and how they long to break out of their status. Caste, class, and religion play crucial roles. Adiga's tone reminded me of Joyce's paralyzed "Dubliners;" both share a detached, yet sympathetic, eye towards people they've scrutinzed unsparingly, yet compassionately.

No romanticism remains. Chennaya, an ambitious cart-puller paid in cash from which he must pay back each day a rupee to his boss for the "privilege" of being chosen to work for him, expresses the common complaint over three-hundred-and-forty pages. "Somewhere, I hope, a poor man will strike a blow against the world. Because there is no God watching over us. There is no one coming to release us from the jail in which we have locked ourselves." (199)

No comic relief, no lighthearted rhapsodies of natural beauty, no whimsical culture clashes will be found here. This India, far off from the great cities, languishes in its own globalization as its peoples talk and pray in many languages and divide themselves into subdivisions that baffle even the natives. However, the clever ones sprinkle trendy English words into whatever tongue that betrays their discontent.

The best stories, from a very loosely joined, slightly overlapping cast of characters, involve the boy bomber, the cart-puller, a quack charlatan, and the mosquito sprayer. Others, such as that of a schoolteacher or a Brahmin spinster who must work as a maid for a Christian family, seem more character studies than stories that end in an unexpected way, however accurately shown in a fashion that reminds me of Flaubert's sharp preference for social studies.

Ardiga, like many naturalists of 19c literature, appears to aim at a style that follows characters who cannot escape their fate. Charity's withheld, and the cathedral remains unfinished while the old forest's razed for a stadium. The town itself finds itself swelling daily with desperate arrivals from the countryside, and India here contrasts the guidebook prose of the paired stories across seven days with the steady, unrelenting tone of the stories that unfold from the inhabitants who try to climb up the ladder away from those grasping at it below, only to fall back down again and again.

This does present a weighty set of stories, rather grimly arrayed one after the other by mostly males who resent, understandably would be an understatement, their predicament. Initiative and ingratiation, savvy and cruelty demand that each newcomer to Kittur climb up on the backs of his brother, his bunkmates, his fellow workers who sleep beside him in the gutter. Two hundred other men wait for each man to make a mistake. "The rich can make mistakes again and again," the mosquito-sprayer George laments. "We make only one mistake, and that's that for us." (246) The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist) boasts a local membership of two; the capitalist system will not topple now.

Reading Ardiga, it's difficult for the reader to capture any hope; one finishes this book as depressed as the characters he portrays in recognizably downbeat, yet well-rounded and thoughtfully detailed depth. The fatalism of this collection may sink one's spirits. The imperial and traditional laws may have been changed, but castes and status burden those in Kittur long after the departure of the Portuguese or the British, and colonialism appears to stretch back to Brahmin times despite distant claims by corrupt parties and bribed bureaucrats of a democratic India today. The title speaks for itself, bracketing a bit of depressing normalcy amid the outbursts of chaos (Posted to Amazon US 7-1-09.)

Ag ól tae ar dhíthreabh Hiomalaethid

Léigh mé aréir faoi Tenzin Palmo. Is díthreabhach í. D'fhan sí ina Hiomalaetha dhá blianta déag ina aonar.

Tá scéal go iontach orm. Bhí sí ina chónai leis féin. Ar ndóigh, gach sé bhlianta, chríochnaigh sí soláthar bia leis a daoine a chothú. Bhí sí gan a ithe ach glasraí go fástha aici.

Níl Sasanach í, ar scor ar bith. D'fhoghlaim Diane Perry faoi Búdachas beagán ar bhéagan nuair ní raibh fhios ag daoine faoi sé go fíor ach mír bhídeach eolais ar feadh na caogidí ansiud go coitanta thar lear. Rugadh sí i Londain de dhream uiríseal. Bhí máthair coicnaíoch ag glanta iasc ansin.

D'imigh Diane go hÁise. Iarraidh sí bheith bean rialta. Bhí saol léanmhar aici. Rinneadh sí ord beannaithe i 1964.

I 1976, d'fhág Tenzin Palmo a mainistir. Bhí sí bean rialta amháin i measc manachaigh céad ann. Thósaigh Tenzin clochar ban rialta aici féin in hIndia nuair a fhilleadh sa deireadh ag bheith ceannródaí.

Féic "Gnó Ban i mBúdachas" anseo. Tá roinnt leis Tenzin Palmo le aiste. Insíonn sí faoi a dúshlán ag tabhairt glacadh níos mo chomh bean rialta téisclim.

Mar rinne sí móideanna crábhaidh a bheith uirthi ní dheachaigh ar ais ar lorg aici go dtí go bhfaighe tuiscint eolas aonair sisean féin. Ní dhéarna sí seo murab n-imeoidh ag fáil léargas a bheith aice. Chaith sí cúrsa spioradáilte saor faoi dheireadh de dhíobháil ar aghaidh uirthi.

Chaith sí ag aimsiú saoradh. Chuardaigh sí Búdachas gan imill. Níor chuireadh isteach ná amach uirthi. Tharchéimhnaigh sí míniúithe na manach i bhfad siar in am agus in ionad.

Thóg sí a díthreabh ar throigh 13,200 ardú i Ladach. Dheisigh sí uaicheas le haill. Chaith sí milliún nóimead ag déanamh machnamh istigh an cillín sé-agus-déag.

Bhí sí caillte leis an ocras is beag nár go minic. Mar sin féin, d'ól sí a tae gach lá idir cúig agus sé a chloig faoi dhó. Dúirt sí go Vicki Mackenzie leis a leabhar "Uaimh ina Sneachta": "Is mé Sasanach, tá fhios agat!"

Drinking tea in a Himalayan hermitage.

I read last night about Tenzin Palmo. She's a hermit. She stayed in the Himalayas twelve years alone.

It's an amazing story for me. She was always by herself. Of course, every six months, she gathered a food supply from a person to supply her. She ate nothing but vegetables that she grew.

She's not Tibetan, however. Diane Perry learned about Buddhism little by little when nobody really knew during the fifties but a tiny bit of information about it usually abroad. She grew up in London of humble stock. Her Cockney mother sold fish there.

Diane went off to Asia. She wanted to be a nun. She suffered great hardships. She became ordained in 1964.

In 1976, Tenzin left her monastery. She was the only nun there among a hundred monks. She founded her own nunnery in India when she eventually returned to be a leader.

See "Role of Women in Buddhism" here. There's a section with Tenzin Palmo in an essay. She tells more about her struggle to gain acceptance as a pioneer nun.

She made monastic vows to herself not to come back from her lone quest until she might find enlightenment by herself. She didn't go off for this unless she might leave to get insight for herself. She spent a very long retreat finally free of prejudice against her.

She had to discover liberation. She sought Buddhism without limits. She was left to herself. She trancended the monks' interpretations way back there in time and place.

She built her hermitage at 13,200 feet high in Ladakh. She repaired a lair on a cliff. She spent a million minutes meditating in a six-by-ten cell.

She often nearly starved to death. All the same, she drank her tea between six and eight o'clocks, twice daily. She told Vicki Mackenzie in her book "Cave in the Snow": "I'm English, you know!"

Ghriangraf/ Photo: "Amuigh an hUaimh/ Outside the Cave."