The Journalist and the Buddha

Unitarian Universalist Church, Rochester, MN

Sunday Sermon, February 17, 2008

ROCHESTER, MN — I picked the topic for today’s
sermon, ”Do Buddhists Believe in God?”, because I’m asked occasionally to speak
about Buddhism at churches around town. This is usually the first question to
come up. If it’s not the first question, it’s at least always the one that generates
the most interest and anxiety in the room. 

Everything goes quiet when somebody
finally asks, ”Do Buddhists believe in God?” I believe this quiet that descends
is out of deference for what most people today believe is the ultimate
question, the one that spiritually matters the most. 

The Buddha was careful in answering this question. On the one hand, he often maintained a Sphinx-like silence when asked it, refusing to answer one way or another. At other times, he implied that the answer was "neither knowable nor unknowable," and that spending lots of time and argument trying to find an answer was therefore "not conducive to spiritual life." 

And yet, there is an important
sense, one that serious Buddhists acknowledge, in which questions about God certainly
are the ultimate spiritual questions. 

Many contemporary Buddhists consider
this.   

Haven’t each of us had moments
where we seem to be in touch, even if briefly, with a higher power? No matter
what our religion, this is a common human experience which we register not just
intellectually, but even more so bodily, emotionally, and spiritually. 

During such moments and sometimes
long after, we may feel the powerful, natural arising of positive intentions such
as compassion, equanimity, generosity, patience and truthfulness. 

What are these moments about? Why
do they happen? 

Where does morality come from? 

Seen in this way, few if any
Buddhist masters from 2,500 years of history would object to saying that Buddhist
practice is about finding this living God within oneself, and in one’s daily
life.  

There are three major contemporary teachers
on the relationship of Buddhism to Judeo-Christian notions of God. They are the
Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, and many recent Buddhist interpreters of the Gnostic Gospels, discovered in
the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

The Dalai Lama compares Christian
notions of God and compassion to Buddhist teachings. His favorite device is to
compare Buddhist texts to Bible passages, such as the Matthew 5 passage where
Jesus teaches people to turn the other cheek and ”To love your enemies and pray
for your persecutors.” 

The Dalai Lama says: ”This passage could
be introduced into a Buddhist text and it would not even be recognized as
traditional Christian scriptures.” To demonstrate, he quotes the Dhammapada, a
collection of the Buddha’s sayings, whose most  famous passage reads: ”’He insulted me, he hurt
me, he defeated me, he robbed me.’ Those who think such thoughts will not be
free from hate. For hate is not conquered by hate: hate is conquered by love.
This is eternal law.” 

The Gnostic Gospels, as most of you
probably know, are the ”lost gospels” of early Christianity. Many  people believe these texts describe authentic
Christianity, that is, before institutional religion distorted Jesus’ original teachings
to suit the needs of a powerful, global, proselytizing church. 

Whether that last accusation is fair,
the Gnostic Gospels surely offer a very Buddhist-like early Christianity, and a
very Buddha-like Jesus. 

For example, the Jesus in the Gnostic
Gospel of Thomas, just like the Buddha in the Parable of the Poisoned Arrow,
time after time warns his followers to avoid trying to find his essence in his words,
or in any system of religious or conceptual thinking. 

Every time his followers try to pin
him down in this way, Jesus spins away. He says in the Gospel of Thomas: 

”If those who
lead you say to you, ‘Look, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ the birds of the sky
will get there first.’ If they say, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will get
there first. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.
When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will
realize that it is you who are the children of the living father. But if you
will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are
that poverty.” 

The Buddha, like Jesus, used many verbal
ploys to illustrate that his true, living nature had nothing to do with words
or thoughts or definitions.

In one story, soon after his enlightenment,
the Buddha passed a man on the road who was struck by the Buddha’s
extraordinary radiance and peaceful presence.

The man stopped and asked, "My
friend, what are you? Are you a celestial being or a god?" "No," said the Buddha. "Well,
then, are you some kind of magician or wizard?" Again the Buddha answered, "No." "Are you a
man?" "No." "Well,
my friend, then what are you?" The
Buddha replied, ”I am awake.”

The Buddha taught humans to seek this state
of being awake  within themselves. ”Be a
lamp unto yourselves,” he said.

Jesus also used the metaphor of inner light
to describe his living essence, both in the Bible – ”I am the light of the
world” he says in John 8:12 — and in the Gospel of Thomas when he says: ”I am
the light that is over all. I am the all. The all came forth out of me, and to
me the all has come. Split a piece of wood, I am there. Lift a stone, and you
will find me there.”

Instead
of focusing on these words or the ideas they express, you might try an
experiment. What I am offering here is a traditional Buddhist meditation. 

To
understand the meaning of Jesus’s or the Buddha’s inner light, be aware of your
body and your mind as it is right now, at this very moment, right here in
church. Ask ”How is my body and mind right now?” Don’t look or strain to hear anything
special, inner voices or glinting sunbeams, or anything like that. Just note whatever little
aches and pains or heat or tingling you may feel, anywhere in your body, just
little sensations here and there. As ordinary or boring as it may seem, just with
these for as long as you can.

Just
notice whatever is happening in your body and your mind for a few continuous moments.

This
is a standard Buddhist meditation, but it is also, you see, very much like inviting
you to experience your own body and mind as that piece of wood, or the lifted
rock, from the Gospel of Thomas.

This
is where Jesus said he was to be found.

More
than any other contemporary Buddhist, the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh
has drawn parallels between the Christian and Buddhist conceptions of God.

Thich
Nhat Hanh calls God by a name that he invented, called ”interbeing.” I’ll end
my remarks today with a passage from Thich Nhat Hanh, taken from his
book that compares Buddhism to Christianity called ”Living Buddha, Living
Christ.”

”When we
look into the heart of a flower, we see clouds, sunshine, minerals, time, the
earth, and everything else in the cosmos in it. Without clouds, there could be
no rain, there could be no flower. Without time, the flower could not bloom. In
fact, the flower is made entirely of non-flower elements. It has no
independent, individual existence. It ‘inter-is’ with everything else in the
universe. When we see the nature of interbeing, barriers between ourselves and
others are dissolved, and peace, love and understanding are possible. Whenever
there is understanding, compassion is born.”

To
Thich Nhat Hanh, to the Dalai Lama, and to many other contemporary Buddhists, the
being born anew every moment – as registered in our everyday aches and pains,
our little spots of passing pleasure and our ordinary sensations – are what really
matters.

This
is not a question to be pondered, a theory to be debated, or a belief to be grasped.

It’s
an experience to be had. And it can be had right here, right now. 

It
is, both Buddha and Jesus tell us, a chance to experience the living God.

Copyright @ 2008 Douglas McGill

ROCHESTER, MN — As the New Year rolls in like an inexorable tide, I have watched the elections, done some reading and made a resolution as a journalist, as a citizen, and as a guy.

It’s a resolution about, um, morality.

It’s about how to determine what’s right from what’s wrong, wholesome from unwholesome, especially in the making and consuming of the media.

My resolution is about how to tell the difference between good and evil in the  media, which flattens the bumpy richness of life into a single, thin, fluorescent or inky dimension.

I’m excited but nervous to be writing this.

Because on the one hand, I’m energized to be speaking openly about morality and journalism. That breaks an ancient taboo of my own profession, which is always an exciting day’s work.

On the other hand, there are dangers in talking about morality in journalism, the high-walled and sometimes vengeful kingdom of neutral "objectivity."

Robertson or Chopra?

It’s easy for readers to spot that single word "morality," and immediately decide one has succumbed  to rightwing scolds a la Pat Robertson, or to New Age fuzzyheads a la Deepak Chopra. (The latter being much the greater likelihood for me, Buddhist as I am.)

But it’s just this pigeonholing of anyone who talks about morals that
fuels my drive to find the roots of the problem. Because surely it is
dangerous not just for the media but for society.

If the people who create the mass media and the millions of other who consume it, don’t have a language to talk with each other about what’s right and wrong, what’s healthy and what’s unhealthy to consume, what kind of a mass media and journalism are we going to have?

At the very least, by simple logic, we will have a confused mass media and journalism. And at worst we’ll have a wicked one, as chaos is often exploited by the intelligent but depraved. 

Simple Question

At the library I found three trusted guides through these tricky waters — "communitarian" philosophers who explain why topics like morals, character and virtue are so little discussed in modern society at large. Not just in journalism and the media, but everywhere.

My guides were Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor who wrote “Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy;” Jonathan Durham Peters, a professor of media history at the University of Iowa and the author of “Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition;” and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who wrote a brief but inspiring essay called “Spiritual Thinking.”

All three of these writers ask vivid questions to kick-start moral thinking. One question they all ask in one form or another is:

How come Lady Justice wears a blindfold?

And hey, is that really such a good idea?

The Blindfold Theory

Is willful blindness the best way to make ethical, wise choices? Is it smart to block from our consciousness all those telling little winks and tics
that we constantly receive from the life around us and by which, in reality, we
navigate our daily rounds? 

Hillary Clinton just won the New Hampshire primary based on
a microsecond of tearing up, plus a tiny subtle hitch in her voice that apparently
persuaded a few thousand women to switch their votes to her at the last minute.

Lady Justice would have missed it all. 

The blindfold theory holds that on the societal scale, the rational
process of balancing costs and benefits works better than seeking wisdom from within
one’s supposedly subjective conscience and soul.

Does that reasoning pass the
common sense test? 

I’ve got a big pile of poker chips placed on this question,
because as a journalist I’ve worn a mighty moral blindfold for 30 years. It
goes by the name of “objectivity,” the idea that journalists serve the public best
by writing about issues as neutral bystanders, rigorously detached from what they
observe.

Without taking sides, we journalists are supposed to gather facts and
deliver them to the public to “let the readers decide.” 

Sandel, Peters, Taylor

I’ve wrestled with journalism’s objectivity problem before. After
a fair amount of soul-searching, a few years ago I finally was able to describe
(as many others have before me) the ethical shortcuts and rationalizations that
journalists make in objectivity’s name. 

But until I read my three philosopher-guides, I’d never
before felt that I understood the true roots of the problem. So how could I
ever have hoped to resolve it? 

The three authors are Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor
who wrote “Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics;” Jonathan Durham
Peters, a professor of media history at the University of Iowa and the author
of “Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition;” and the
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who wrote a brief essay called “Spiritual
Thinking.”   

For all three writers, the mighty blindfold is called liberal
political theory, which is not just a theory of course but the bedrock faith of
modern western society. These authors especially deplore the strain of
liberalism that has dominated in the past half-century, which they say has removed
individuals as moral decision-makers from public affairs. 

Depressed Newsrooms

“According to this liberalism,” Sandel writes, “government
should be neutral as to conceptions of the good life. Government should not
affirm, through its policies or laws, any particular conception of the good
life; instead it should provide a neutral framework of rights within which people
can choose their own values and ends.” 

By defining individual moral action in society as a choice
between ready-made options, which Sandel calls the “procedural republic,” instead
of developing the character of individuals to make subtle, case-by-case
decisions, Sandel says society loses in the end. 

“A political agenda lacking substantive moral discourse is
one symptom of the public philosophy of the procedural republic,” he writes. It
has also “coincided with a growing sense of disempowerment. Despite the
expansion of rights in recent decades, Americans find to their frustration that
they are losing control of the forces that govern their lives.” 

That sounds like the depressed atmosphere of mainstream
newsrooms today. 

Disempowerment in newsrooms today takes many forms, all the
way from mass layoffs at newspapers that are downsizing, to the frustration of
reporters who are assigned to cover celebrity scandals while skipping important
civic issues.

Meanwhile, there is neither any substantive moral discourse in
newsrooms about these trends, nor any suitable framework to have one. (Only
fired and refugee mainstream journalists on the Internet can try that!) 

"Satanic" Arguments

John Durham Peters’ critique of liberalism is more radical than
Sandel’s, especially on the right to free speech and the lengths to which he believes
the media exploit it. 

“There is something satanic about many liberal arguments in
favor of free expression,” Peters writes. “Defenders of free speech often like
to plumb the depths of the underworld. They tread where angels do not dare and
reemerge escorting scruffy, marginal, or outlaw figures, many of whom spend
their time planting slaps in the face of the public.” 

In a talk at McGill University last year, Peters placed a red
laser dot on liberalism in plainer English: “Liberalism undermines itself by
pretending to be above the battle, by pretending to be neutral. Lots of
liberals say it’s only a set of procedures and rules. But I would suggest that
liberalism is one of the players. It’s not a referee. And that liberalism needs
to recognize that it too has a vision. And that even in claiming neutrality it
thereby forfeits a kind of neutrality, because by always trying to seek the
higher ground it ends up pushing people out of an ethical position.” 

Looking back, I have never seen more moral hypocrisy than in
mainstream newsrooms, such as at The New York Times where I worked as a
reporter from 1979 to 1989, and as a bureau chief for Bloomberg News in its Tokyo,
London and Hong Kong newsrooms in the 1990s. Of course, I count myself as one
of the hypocrites. 

Absolutism Corrupts Absolutely?

On the one hand, reporters and editors in all these
newsrooms were deeply committed to ferreting out the truth, and sometimes
showed great courage in doing so. This behavior alone demonstrates journalists’ deeply personal and moral involvement in society. 

Yet at the same time, whenever moral questions arose upon the
publication of our hard-won factual narratives, our first impulse was always to
exempt ourselves from any further dialog by citing “objectivity.”

Our job was simply
to gather and put out the information we dug up, we told our miffed complainants,
and that was the end of our involvement. 

The accuracy of the facts that we published, and not any further
discussion about the moral shadings raised by the timing or manner of their
publication, was the highest moral principle we felt beholden too. “You’ve got
a problem with what we published, talk to our lawyers,” we’d say to anyone who
raised questions.

Free speech absolutism was the alpha and the omega of our moral
thinking. That was expedient, but was it right? 

Reflecting on my newsroom experience in the light of Sandel
and Peters, I think that by insisting on such moral disengagement, we journalists
hurt society in several ways.

Three Problems 

First, we abdicate our leadership role in society as clear,
honest, reliable communicators. We limit the valuable contributions that we
could make to society as exemplary communicators, by clinging to a hypocrisy that
is visible for all to see.

Second, we contribute to journalism’s decline by
degrading the public trust that is journalism’s principal foundation.

Third,
and worst of all, by our moral obtuseness we fail to create a public space that
facilitates robust and open discussion about what constitutes the good life –
the best forms of government, the best values and models of human behavior. 

A multicultural and global society especially needs such a
free and open forum to progress peacefully. If journalism doesn’t create one, what
social institution will? 

These questions apply to citizen journalists — the millions
of bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers and other ordinary folks who are reporting
the world around them on the Internet — as much and even more so than to trained
journalists. 

Because like it or not, the formal institutions of
journalism, and with them the traditional journalistic values they once protected, are crumbling. That turns the ethical imperative for creating useful
journalism over to the people who account for the vast majority of hours that actually are spent today in society looking around, and then recording and commenting
on what’s seen, the essential journalistic enterprise. 

So what’s the answer? 

Neighbors and Strangers

My philosopher-guides guides offer three variations on a
civic-minded theme. 

Michael Sandel counsels a revival of republican public
philosophy that stresses the formation of individual moral character, much
along the lines that Thomas Jefferson endorsed in his agrarian vision of
democracy. 

John Durham Peters advocates drawing on religious traditions
that are in sync with each other and with secular solidarity. “One of the
central principles of the law in Judaism is kindness to the stranger, and one
of the central principles of Christianity is love of the neighbor,” he says. “In
some way, [those] are more powerful foundations for thinking about society than
liberalism if you want a society with both solidarity and freedom in it.” 

Charles Taylor, in his brief but enlightening essay, advocates
a communitarian project similar to Sandel’s and Peters’. Yet he cautions that any future
peaceful world will require a burdensome body of laws and rules to maintain order. 

“We will in many ways be living lives under even greater
discipline than today,” Taylor says. “More than ever we are going to need
trail-blazers who will open or retrieve forgotten modes of prayer, meditation,
friendship, solidarity and compassionate action.” 

Personally, I doubt that any such trail-blazers will be
wearing blindfolds. 

My Resolution

My New Year’s resolution is to work as a journalist, to act
as a citizen, and to live as a human without a blindfold.

Instead, I’ll try to simply use my God-given
head and heart and eyes.

ROCHESTER, MN — In the grocery checkout line the other day, holding my milk and eggs in hand, I scanned the magazine rack headlines:

• The Blended Orgasm – A More Intense Climax
• Bite Me! Woman’s Bizarre Relationship With Mosquitoes
• Bomb Blast Near Bhutto Kills 126 in Pakistan
• “Queen of Mean” Leaves $12 Million to Pet Pooch
• Viking Fans Feel the Pain, Again and Again and …

Has anyone out there noticed how a calm mind evaporates like the dew when exposed to newspaper headlines, magazine covers, and Sunday morning talk TV?

Even the serious Pakistan headline above, mixed into this gruel, is transformed into a jitter-making diversion, a passing frisson of gloom.

Yet there is a sense too in which the Pakistan headline fits right along with the others – that is, in the human insanity being described. The tabloids all-too-accurately report on our obsessive attachments and delusions, on the human condition, just as our newspapers factually report the news.

All of it dispels calm:

The strange human urge to be bitten! Maybe I’ll experiment!

The urgency of news from Pakistan! I must respond to it!

Blended orgasms – wow! How can I get one or give one?

I point to how the mass media transforms calm to agitation, because according to the Buddhist tradition, developing inner calm is the royal road to wisdom, which is the royal road to peace.

Obsessions & Fetters

Therefore, if the mass media — and journalism as the conscience of the mass media — is going to contribute to world peace, it will have to help develop calm states of mind among its consumers worldwide.

The Buddhist term for calm is “samatha,” or tranquility.

“Monks!” the Buddha once addressed his orange-robed followers. “There is the case where a monk has developed insight preceded by tranquility. As he develops insight preceded by tranquility, the path is born. He follows that path, develops it and pursues it. As he follows the path, developing it and pursuing it — his fetters are abandoned, his obsessions destroyed.”

Those would be the fetters of ignorance and mental restlessness, and the obsession with forming solid opinions, theories, identities and careers.

Developing calm mind states, the Buddha said, begins the path to peace.

Is the mass media, and journalism as the conscience of the media, following this path?

Is the mass media’s role as a major influence on mass mind-states even explicitly addressed in the codified ethics of any branch of the mass media? If not, why not?

Planetary Resource

When you think of it, is there any resource on the planet more precious than a calm mind? The human race needs calm minds like it needs oxygen. When calm minds disappear, anxiety appears, and violence lurks close by.

Without a calm collective mind the human species surely will perish as quickly as if the ozone layer disappeared, or the polar ice caps melted tomorrow. And the mass media – when consumed or produced in huge amounts by anxious and scattered minds – is surely one of the greatest manmade threats to the vital planetary resource of calm minds.

Buddhist psychology precisely names the three basic toxins – the Buddha called them “visiting forces” – that attack the naturally calm human mind.

They are the “kilesas,” or defilements, and they come in three main varieties: greed, which is wanting to grasp what is pleasant; aversion, which is wanting to avoid or annihilate what is unpleasant; and delusion, which is ignorance of reality and an infatuation with unreal things.

Giddy Blisses

Mixing these three ingredients in different proportions yields the full menu of poisons that human beings fall heir to – anger, jealousy, lust, fear, anxious planning, tearful reminiscing, giddy blisses, judging, perfectionism, hypochondria, self-pity, martyrdom, horror, depression, and on and on.

As a journalist, my concern is that I know very little about the role that words and images play as a host or vector of the kilesas; or how language might be used to host, transmit, or support calm and wise states of mind.

The idea that as a journalist, not to mention as a person, I unconsciously host or transmit language toxins – kilesas, if you will, destroyers of the precious natural resource of calm – is slightly haunting. So is the idea that my culture offers no training in the public use of language in wholesome, ethical ways.

Don’t get me wrong.

I am 100% in favor of blended orgasms, whatever they are.

I just want to be able to get one, to give one, and as a journalist to tell the world about them – along with the distracting yet important daily news — while also staying wise, caring and calm.

I went to the Common Ground Meditation Center tonight in Minneapolis, where the guiding teacher, Mark Nunberg, gave a talk on the Seven Factors of Awakening. I’ve  been reading recently about the monks of Burma who are protesting the repressive government of Myanmar (Burma) by marching by the thousands in the streets, and refusing to take alms from government officials. I went to Mark’s dharma talk listening for points of  connection to what’s happening on the Burmese streets.

The Burmese monks’ protest seems like an ideal case study in engaged Buddhism. After all, Buddhism in Burma is one of the  original sources of the Theravada/Vipassana style Buddhism that is growing fast in the United States; that is taught at the Common Ground Center; that I personally study and follow; and that is focused on  a simple practice of finding peace in one’s heart and mind. What would cause monks who live out this practice on a daily basis to rise up in such an overt political action?

Mark’s talk offered several points of illumination, which made clear why, if a political protest is carried out skilfully with wholesome intentions, it is no different from doing anything else in life. For example, Mark talked about how important it is to be aware of attachments that arise in meditation. This can be subtle and a difficult skill to master. For example, it’s relatively easy to see how attached we become to  positive phenomena — good food, money, the praise of peers, etc.  But we can also equally become attached to subtle spiritual longings as well — happiness, joy, peace, calm.

When Mark said "attachment to calmness is craving," I saw one connection to the Burmese monks. By taking to the streets, those monks have abandoned that attachment, big time. They were giving themselves up to their experience completely, come what may, positive or negative. Presumably, they had also checked their intentions before they walked, to be sure they were acting from compassion towards the military government and not from hatred; and also had resolved, to the degree humanly possible, not to act on any violent urges that might arise during their marches.

Mark then dived into a really deep teaching that is hard for people to believe, if they haven’t experienced it personally. And it opened another channel for me to the Burmese monks.

Mark was talking about mindfulness and pain. The two simply cannot coexist, he said, because the one cancels the other. For example, if you are experiencing pain and you bring mindfulness to the pain, the degree of mindfulness you muster, is the degree of pain reduced. The mindfulness chips away at the pain in degrees. For example, at first, you simply notice that with  physical pain comes a raft of mental activity that is  counter-productive, such as worry the pain will continue forever, that you did something wrong to cause the pain, that your life will be ruined thanks to the pain, etc.

The moment you realize this, the opportunity arises to let go of all that useless thought, simply because you see it’s useless and there’s no need to keep grasping to it. Then other, deeper layers of pain may be reduced by mindfulness. Just watching the actual physical pain for a while, paying close attention to it without exerting the slightest effort to relieve the pain or fight it, itself creates a healing effect. In  my experience, what happens is the pain tends to atomize, to break into small bits, so that the overall pain becomes much less monolithic, and much more a phenomenon of twinkling bits of sensation through which awareness can flow like water through a gorge.

In the Common Ground mediation room, reflecting in this way, I remembered a time in my life when I was bedridden for several months, dealing with severe pain during all of my waking hours. I remember how hard it was to deal with the pain. I was able to do it, but only by basically meditating all day long. Every time my mindfulness slipped, the pain returned, and I was reminded to get back in the moment, back to seeing things the way they were right now. I had mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I was intrigued by the experience and the wisdom I seemed to be gaining. On the other, since my life at the time, including the people around me, weren’t set up to support a person basically meditating all day, I felt like a fish out of water. I could put my ambivalent feelings into the same meditative hopper — "this is the way it is right now" — but I never felt fully reconciled.

In any case, as the hour of meditation progressed this evening, I felt more and more open, rawer and rawer as time went on. All of this remembering of pain, and of the mindfulness I mustered to counter the pain, was making me feel painful and open. This deepened my feeling for the monks. To a new depth, I felt I could understand how those monks are feeling in their heart of hearts, and it can’t be easy for them. They are surely feeling big pain. They are surely trying to muster big mindfulness to counter that pain, but they must be feeling ambivalent too, and struggling with that.

Tomorrow, I’ll sign and send onwards an Internet petition that’s going around, and I’ll send a fax of protest to the Burmese embassy. When my own sitting group meets tomorrow night, I’ll suggest that we reflect on the monks of Burma, as a possible prelude to further action. But whatever I do, I know I’ll act with greater compassion than before, because this is what arose when I brought mindfulness to the pain within myself. The gap that opened between myself and pain, was suddenly filled with compassion. For myself, yes, but for others too.

Figuring out how to skilfully recognize, accept and direct that compassion, seems to me my next task. We’ll see what happens.

A famous Tibetan Buddhist training is to regard everyone you meet in the world as the Buddha.  That is, everyone you meet has something profound to teach. Figuring out what the teaching is, is your job.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve been finding Buddhas all over the place recently. The Tibetan training encourages you to find the Buddha even in horrible, vile people who act precisely opposite to the way you would expect the Buddha to act. That’s not the kind of person I’m finding.

The kind of person I’m finding talks like the Buddha talks. They seem like actual living Buddhas, people who at least in one sphere of their lives have gained real wisdom, and have the ability to share their wisdom in a compelling way. 

My favorite person of this type is the Dog Whisperer, Cesar Milan. Time after time in his National Geographic TV program, Cesar walks into a home riven with human anxieties that the house pet has picked up and is acting out. With his patented "calm assertive energy" Cesar proceeds each time to cooly diagnose the problem and settle things down, usually dispensing gems of Buddhistic wisdom in the process. I’ll write about Cesar and his wisdom gems of peace and tranquility soon.

And, I’ll start adding a feature to The Journalist and the Buddha, of quick snapshots of all the Buddhas I meet and learn from along my own life’s path.

Let’s start with Buddha #1, a young man named Josh Swiller, interviewed the other day on NPR (thanks to my friend Alexa Olesen in Beijing for the link). Josh was profoundly deaf for most of his life until three  years ago, when he received a cochlear implant. Now he hears almost 100 percent.

Here is an exchange between NPR’s Scott Simon and Swiller:

Simon:  Are there times, now that you are hearing the whole cacophony of sounds that is our world, that you sometimes miss the quiet?

Swiller:  Oh, sure. One of the most amazing things about deafness and the signing deaf community is that when you are deaf without hearing aids or implants you are alone with your thoughts a lot. And I think being alone with your thoughts, it promotes empathy for other people. Because you get to see that having a mind with all its complaints and thoughts and worries is not an easy  thing for anyone. If you ever spend time in the deaf community, it’s one of the most wonderful, compassionate communities. I think maybe with all of the noise we have in our modern world that gets lost a little bit.

The Buddha couldn’t have said it better himself. It sounds to me as if profound deafness naturally nurtures the insights one seeks through vipassana or "insight" meditation. One such insight being what a huge  pain in the ass it is to have a human mind, endlessly storming off in all directions.

The theory of Buddhist insight meditation is that such insights tend to cause compassion to arise. And here we have Josh Swiller, saying this often happens for people who are stone deaf.

For the full interview click here.

Amazing.

ROCHESTER, MN — Journalists talk to strangers. It’s what we do.

There is the biblical story of Abraham who,  while in the midst of an ecstatic conversation with God, is interrupted by three strangers who appear at his tent. Abraham immediately drops his prayer to take care of the strangers — to wash their feet, to give them food, and to chat a while.

The spiritual benefits of Abraham’s hospitality become known soon enough — his visitors later turned out to be manifestations of God. So it turns out there’s no difference between talking to God and talking to strangers, except that it takes time and effort to understand strangers as divine.

But talking with strangers in the ancient Middle East had distinctly practical benefits as well. They brought news of neighboring tribes, shared ideas about farming and herding, told of daughters and sons in nearby villages who’d reached marriageable age, and opened new channels for trade.

Anyone can talk with strangers, but it’s journalism’s central professional duty to do so. Across all barriers of race, age, nationality, color, rank or class, it’s the journalist’s job to ask questions of people who live across those barriers, to discover their news, their beliefs and conditions of life.

Journalism serves democracy by talking to strangers and by sharing their wisdom and life experiences with others. This brings strangers into society’s fold; and it brings us into their fold; which makes us not strangers but familiars.

The practice of talking with strangers strengthens society and democracy in innumerable ways. It evaporates dark secrets that could fester and explode. It alerts society to potential dangers, and it helps focus scattered resources on trouble spots when emergencies arise.

At the same time, talking with strangers extracts the most useful life wisdom from all of society’s members and shares that wisdom with all.

Over the past six years, I’ve talked to many strangers who are our fellow American citizens, mostly immigrants from foreign lands – Somalis, Cambodians, Mexicans, Chinese, Croatians, Indians, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Uighurs, Anuak, Iranians, Sri Lankans, Laotians, and others.

The  stranger who has made the deepest impact on me as a journalist and as a person – from whom I’ve learned the most – is both among the most exotic people I’ve ever met, and the most dead.

He is Siddhartha Guatama, a prince-turned-monk who lived in northern India in the 6th century B.C. He is known to history as the Buddha, the formal name he took after experiencing a tranquility of the soul so deep he felt compelled to spend his life teaching it to others.

This particular stranger has struck me as so wise — his life experiences  and his teaching so profound and so relevant to our times — that I’ve decided to spend a little more time as a journalist with him. I want to learn more, and to share more of what I am learning from this stranger.

Starting today, alternating with my regular Global Minnesota columns, I’ll begin publishing a series of reports of my encounters with the Buddha at The Journalist and the Buddha.

Keeping things simple, the topics I hope to cover include:

• What might this wise stranger have to say about such modern-day challenges as terrorism, multiculturalism, immigration, identity-politics, corrupt leadership, and religious extremism?
• Does world peace start with individual morality, and if so how can the two be realistically and practically combined?
• Western Buddhism is usually about learning how to meditate as a stress-reliever, without discussion of the Buddha’s ethical teachings. Does that make sense? How can we become moral, without moralizing?

The Buddha was far from apolitical.  He led a large community of sometimes quarrelsome monks; he administered discipline to them as needed; he ordained women as nuns against prevailing social norms; and he gave advice to local kings and generals during times of famine, ethnic violence, epidemics and war. In so doing, the Buddha taught lessons of powerful contemporary relevance.

Avoiding moralizing and religious cant, the Buddha also defined simple steps that ordinary people  can take to address, to ease, and to solve personal problems and global problems.

We can learn from such a stranger.

At least, for a little, he deserves a listen. What have we got to lose?