Rev. Danny Fisher

As I mentioned in a blog post yesterday, I just turned thirty. It was a good day. I’m very busy pulling things together for my move back to California, and so I took some time off in the morning to ride my bike and go for breakfast (a vegan chocolate chip muffin and soy milk) at Earth Fare, where I leisurely read through the terrific new issue of Shambhala Sun. (In particular, don’t miss the awesome Rod Meade Sperry’s editorial, the cover story on Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and his extraordinary family, the profile of our friend and past interviewee Joan Halifax Roshi, and the magazine’s continued look back at “30 Years of the Best of Buddhism in America”.) After that, I got a haircut at an old fashioned barber shop here in Greensboro that I like. Later, my folks and I had dinner at Saffron Indian Cuisine.

Simple pleasures. A good birthday.

A few days ago, I posted about a recent episode of American Public Media’s Speaking of Faith that featured Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. After listening to that interview, my hombre Jesse F. Tanner (a Unity minister and chaplain in training) wrote up an excellent critique of the use of mindfulness in medicine and the social sciences over at his terrific blog Progressive-Practical Christianity.

I would echo Jesse’s positive comments as well as his concerns. In particular, I agree with him that there is territory that has not been sufficiently addressed around taking soteriological technologies like meditation out of their respective religious contexts and then applying them to other situations. Simply paring away the religious language has never quite cut it for me. Here’s a snippet of Jesse’s comments on the subject:

Though I thoroughly respect and admire [Kabat-Zinn's] work and feel it’s doing much good, I feel he’s dissociated these practices from religion too much. They are historically and culturally grounded in religious contexts, which speaks to the role religion plays in their actual engagement and effectiveness. That is, because these practices emerged from religious individuals and communities with explicitly spiritual concerns, these meditative techniques are intrinsically geared toward and infused with spiritual aims and purposes. I think that stripping them of their religious connection is somewhat degrading to the religions from which they’ve come and prevents a full experience of what these techniques were created to do – experience the Ultimate and live according to these insights.

I’m not saying that using them for the purpose of stress-relief is unwarranted. To the contrary, I think it’s wonderful that people can benefit from these mindfulness practices without recourse to religious concerns. The non-religious may think that meditative techniques only have non-spiritual benefits, but I’d want to ask for a definition of spirituality here.

You can read his full post here.

In addition, this conversation reminded me of a past post and some really thoughtful comments about the use of mindfulness in public schools. It’s an older post, but still relevant. Take a look back if you have time.

[Photo by Ian Bennett. The author is pictured sitting zazen with others at the Indosan Nipponji Temple, Bodh Gaya, India, October 2006.]

An anonymous writer reports for Radio Free Asia on suspicions that agents of Burma’s junta may have infiltrated the Theravāda sangha in order to find out what kinds of pro-democracy activities the monks and nuns there may be up to.

Now, however, there are suspicions that the government has put informers even among the monks, to head off any more protests and to root out monks encouraging dissent.

“You don’t know which monk is ‘real’ and which monk is ‘fake,’” a friend told me.

Read the whole report here.

[Image via Radio Free Asia.]

Our pal in the buddhoblogosphere Rod Meade Sperry has the story over at Shambhala Sun Space.

Via the awesome Rod Meade Sperry over at Shambhala Sun Space: Fox News will be interviewing His Holiness the Dalai Lama while he visits the United States in the coming weeks. They’re asking readers/viewers for question suggestions. Suggest a question here.