Rev. Danny Fisher

Photo by HBO.
I watched a wonderful little documentary tonight about one of my favorite television shows: HBO’s In Treatment. In Treatment is the American reworking of the Israeli series Betipul. Each week, we get five half-hour episodes that dramatize five psychotherapuetic sessions. There are certainly narrative threads, but the show is faithfully committed to giving us the verisimilitude of “a full session” in every half-hour. The star, who is the therapist for four episodes and the patient for one, is the peerless Gabriel Byrne, of Miller’s Crossing and The Usual Suspects fame.

Anyway, this documentary, In Treatment: Private and Confidential, was not so much about the production of the show as it was about the psychotherapeutic issues that In Treatment explores. HBO assembled a whole host of professionals in the field of psychology to talk about the show and its themes. Among them, I was delighted to see Mark Epstein, contributing editor to Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and the author of such vital works as Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective and Going to Pieces without Falling Apart. Dr. Epstein had a lot of good things to say, and I thought it was great to see Buddhists in the caring professions represented. Follow this link to find future showtimes for the documentary.

I don’t know about you, but I could certainly stand to watch less television. That said, if everything I watched was as good as In Treatment, I probably wouldn’t feel that way. It’s well worth taking a look at if you haven’t already. I’ve posted the trailers for seasons 1 and 2, respectively, below.

Via Barbara’s Buddhism Blog: The Wall Street Journal offers a fascinating piece today about how the medical school at the Buddhist-founded Tzu Chi University has taken the lead on encouraging Taiwanese people to donate their dead bodies to science. Certain aspects of Chinese religious culture have hindered the study of cadavers in the past, but Tzu Chi founder and leader Master Cheng Yen has created farewell rituals to help doctors and donors navigate these concerns. Author Tseng Guo-Fang writes:

Traditionally, Chinese view their bodies as a bequeathal from their ancestors. This means bodies mustn’t be damaged before burial. At Tzu Chi, therefore, Ms. Cheng insists that — unlike in Western medical schools — cadavers be sutured after being cut up. The laborious process takes days, but in the end the body is whole.

Ms. Cheng also makes a more profound pitch to potential donors: Society needs you.

The effect of this work at Tzu Chi University has been remarkable.

More than 23,500 Taiwanese have willed their bodies to Tzu Chi, allowing the hospital to satisfy its educational needs and supply other schools on the island. Following Tzu Chi’s lead, other schools have implemented similar commemorative services, eliminating the shortage of corpses that long hindered the Taiwanese medical establishment.

“The public was conservative about corpse donation, but Tzu Chi has made the public more open-minded,” says Lu Ko-shian, director of the National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Anatomy and Cell Biology. “Tzu Chi changed that mindset with the power of religion.”

Master Cheng Yen’s Tzu Chi Foundation is one of four organizations in Taiwan doing significant amounts of work to propogate the Buddhadharma. The others are Master Sheng-yen’s Dharma Drum Mountain, Master Wei Chueh’s Chung Tai Shan, and Master Hsing Yun’s Fo Guang Shan.

Take a look at the article–as I say above, it’s pretty fascinating. The story also includes a video report:

“A child soldier wearing a Burmese army uniform.” Photo by Yuzo for The Irrawaddy.
Here are today’s stories about Burma:

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.]