The Religion News Service‘s crack reporter Daniel Burke has two excellent pieces that I recommend you check out.
First is his feature about karma and Cyclone Nargis. (I found this piece via Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen blog–Brad is one of the interviewees.) It’s an important moment to talk about karma, as it has been invoked recently to explain both the cyclone and the struggles of the Tibetan people. As Mr. Burke writes:
About 80 percent of Myanmar’s estimated 52 million people are Buddhist, and many there rely on the principle of karma to explain the storm, scholars say.
Specifically, many Myanmar people believe Cyclone Nargis is a karmic consequence of military rulers’ brutal crackdown on Buddhist monks last fall, said Ingrid Jordt, an anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who was once a Buddhist nun in Myanmar and maintains ties there.
“The immediate explanation was: This is retribution for killing monks,” Jordt said. “In any cataclysm, human beings seek to make sense of something that completely destroys the continuity of life. It’s an attempt to bring the world back into harmony.”
[...]
Karma extends to other Buddhist traditions as well. The Dalai Lama has reportedly said that Tibet’s loss of sovereignty in the 1950s can be at least partially attributed to his country’s feudal past. A spokesman for the exiled spiritual leader could not be reached Thursday (May 8) to clarify his comments.
Again, I think this would be a good piece for jump-starting crucial conversations in Buddhist communities about karma. Take a look at it.
The second piece for your consideration is a recent post by Mr. Burke for the service’s
Religion News Blog. In the post, entitled “Where’s the Zen?”, he critiques the language used in a recent piece for the
Washington Post.
The article is titled “Get Zen” and the subhead reads “Four Ways Washingtonians can find Zen without stressing over its cost.” I eagerly skipped through the article, hoping to find some good information on local Zen temples or Zen practitioners. But no. By “Zen” the Post didn’t mean “a variety of Buddhism now practiced especially in Japan, Vietnam and Korea, seeking to attain an intuitive illumination of mind and spirit through meditation,” as Webster’s (and many others) define it. They meant yoga, reiki, qi gong and other “woo-woo-New-Agey,” practices, as writer Ellen MCarthy puts it.
Then comes this: “But Zen isn’t meant to be one-size-fits-all, and each practice is welcoming of newcomers.”
It’s certainly true that Zen is not one-size-fits all. But it’s also true that none of these things are Zen. The article does mention at least one Buddhist temple, but it’s part of the very different Vipassana, or Insight Meditation, tradition. I realize that we’ve taken Zen to new places in America, so to speak, and use the word to vaguely refer to a kind of calm abiding. But lumping all these practices, worthwhile though they may be, under the category of Zen is inaccurate at best, and insulting to Zen practitioners. Somehow I can’t imagine a writer repeatedly using the phrase “gospel singing” and then sending readers to a mosque to check it out.
[NOTE: As of 9.10.08, the online version of the Post piece is not titled "Get Zen".]
I think Mr. Burke makes a great point here about the carelessness with which the media and others generally use certain Buddhist terms. I’m sure it was no one’s intention to demean anyone or confuse anything, but that’s exactly what this sort of slapdash approach to language does. Mr. Burke is quite right indeed, I think, when he says that the use of the term “Zen” in this way is both inaccurate and insulting to those who practice in one of the Zen traditions. Let’s hope for less of this kind of thing in the future, and more from Mr. Burke.
In a mass email today from the U.S. Campaign for Burma, Aung Din, Jeremy Woodrum, Jennifer Quigley, and Thelma Young write about the condition of Nobel Peace laureate and Myanmar Prime Minister-elect Aung San Suu Kyi. They say:
