Salon.com > Stephen Prothero

Boomer Buddhism

Mon, 26 Feb 2001 22:39:00 +0000

As anyone who hasn't spent the last few years meditating in a cave in Asia knows, American Buddhism is booming. The 1990s saw three Buddhist movies and a gaggle of celebrity Buddhist pitchmen, including Beastie Boy Adam Yauch and actor Richard Gere. The United States is now home to at least a million not-so-famous Buddhists as well, most of them new immigrants from Asia. But Buddhism is also popular among hip Americans who have never attended a Zen center or visualized a Tibetan mandala.

Typically these sympathizers get their Buddhism, as beat author Jack Kerouac did, from books. Buddhist bestsellers used to come along once a decade: Kerouac's "Dharma Bums" in the '50s, Philip Kapleau's "Three Pillars of Zen" in the '60s and Shunryu Suzuki's "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" in the '70s. Today they materialize monthly, along with more evanescent titles like "Zen and the Art of Screenwriting" (really). Demand for Buddhist books has turned many teachers into stand-alone brands with remarkable marketing muscle. The Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh are the Coke and Pepsi of this Buddhist generation, but homegrown brands such as Jack Kornfield and Lama Surya Das can also move 100,000 tomes without getting off their zafus.

“Nothing Like It in the World” by Stephen E. Ambrose

Tue, 05 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000

Walt Whitman's poem "Passage to India" is supposedly about the union of America and Asia, but it never quite reaches the Ganges. It lingers instead on the Sierra Nevada and the plains of the Midwest. That's because the inspiration behind the poem was an American event: the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.

Stephen E. Ambrose is a historian in the Whitmanian vein. He is popular, prolific and patriotic, and his writing tends inexorably toward the grandiose. Ambrose has written on Eisenhower and Nixon, D-Day and Lewis and Clark. His bibliography includes works with titles ("Stephen Ambrose Collection" and "The Best of Stephen Ambrose") typically reserved for aging rock stars.

His latest hit, "Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869," is, like most of Ambrose's work, primarily an exercise in storytelling. And Ambrose tells a good story, describing the job of building America's grand iron highway as a nip-and-tuck race between the Central Pacific (CP) in the West and the Union Pacific (UP) in the East.

Skulls in the closet

Fri, 21 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

One evening in May 1967, a man dressed in a black hood and sporting a gold pin emblazoned with a skull and crossbones approached George W. Bush, slapped him on the back and offered him membership in Yale's oldest secret society. The governor-to-be accepted and, like his grandfather and father before him, became a member of Skull and Bones.

Skull and Bones is one of the nation's most exclusive and powerful secret societies. The list of past and present Bonesmen, as members are called, makes California's Bohemian Grove retreat (also patronized by Gov. Bush and his dad) look like your local Rotary Club. Members have served as senators, secretaries of state, national security advisors, attorneys general, CIA directors and Supreme Court justices. They have also become presidents of universities, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, foundation presidents and founders of investment banks. Two Bonesmen, William Howard Taft and George Bush, were elected president, a post Gov. Bush now hopes to fill.

“Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal” by Richard Wightman Fox

Wed, 15 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

One of the country's greatest communicators, a married man, stands accused of having
his way with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Instead of
confessing, he offers tortured testimony about what sex is and is
not. Though the man is not convicted, his reputation is tarred
forever. The woman withdraws from view but cannot escape public
ridicule.

Sound familiar? It shouldn't, because this trial of the century was a
19th-century case. The year was 1875. The woman was Elizabeth Tilton.
And the accused was the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, brother of
Harriet Beecher Stowe, pastor of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church and the
nation's most beloved preacher.

The Beecher-Tilton scandal is by no means undiscovered territory for
historians, who have made sport of trashing the not-so-reverend
Beecher for over a century. It is now common knowledge that Beecher
and Tilton had sex (whatever that means). But beating up the dead for
adultery is passi. So historians accuse Beecher instead of the
high crime (or is it a misdemeanor?) of hypocrisy. And they blame the
sentimental Protestantism he championed for paving the way for the
noxious self-absorption of New Age navel-gazing.

Books: Inner Revolution

Mon, 30 Mar 1998 20:00:00 +0000

"A specter is haunting Europe," Karl Marx wrote 150 years ago in "The Communist Manifesto," "the specter of communism." Influenced by Marx's claim that religion is "the opiate of the masses," sociologists have traditionally viewed Buddhism as otherworldly, apolitical, pessimistic, socially apathetic and ethically inert -- the most powerful of religious opiates. Robert Thurman's "Inner Revolution" is a Buddhist manifesto that stands Marx and the sociologists on their heads. A specter is haunting America, he argues, and it's the friendly ghost of Tibetan Buddhism.

Thurman is a Buddhist Studies professor at Columbia University and, if we are to believe Time magazine, one of the 25 most influential people in America. But his real job is playing James Carville to the Dalai Lama's President Clinton. "Inner Revolution" is one part autobiography, two parts philosophy, three parts history and four parts spin. Here readers learn that Thurman was the first Westerner ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk, that the Buddha was great in bed, that selflessness is the key to real happiness and that Tibet is "a mandala of the peaceful, perfected universe." But Thurman's aim is not to portray Tibet as Shangri-la. It is to portray Buddhism as deeply ethical and political -- "a coup of the spirit."

Some Of The Dharma

Mon, 17 Nov 1997 20:00:00 +0000

In the mid-'50s, the Dalai Lama was still in Tibet, and Zen centers were as rare as bellbottoms. So when Jack Kerouac tuned in to Buddhism in the winter of 1953, he was pretty much on his own. With no guru to guide him, Kerouac experimented with Buddhism for the next two and a half years. And he recorded the results of his experiment in 11 spiral notebooks just published as "Some of the Dharma."

Begun as a series of notes addressed to another Beat Generation star, Allen Ginsberg, "Some of the Dharma" is an ambitious effort to translate Buddhism into an American idiom. As vast as Texas and as tangled as a Los Angeles freeway, the book is a hodgepodge of poems, prayers, sermons, scripture snippets, commentaries, essay and story fragments, dream sequences and journal entries. Though loaded with little gems ("I'm a farmer/I grow Nirvana") and some clever translations (the Tibetan chant "Om mani padme hum" is rendered "Amen ... The gem in the rags"), the book is a jumble. At least as literature. As autobiography, however, "Some of the Dharma" shines.

SALON Daily Clicks: Newsreal

Sat, 24 May 1997 19:00:00 +0000

Buddhism is back and coming to a stadium near you.

Actually, two stadiums, both in stereo. The "Tibetan Freedom Concert," sponsored by the San Francisco-based Milarepa Fund, hits Downing Stadium on Randall's Island, New York, on June 7 and 8. A competing "Tibetan Freedom Benefit Concert," put on by Tibet House of New York, plays the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on June 8.

Natalie Merchant, Philip Glass and Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers headline the San Francisco gig, while a younger, louder and very trendy crew -- Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Porno for Pyros, Bjvrk, Rancid and the Beastie Boys among them -- will play New York City.

Buddhism in general and Tibet in particular have long been a favored cause/religion among the rock 'n' roll set, but more recently their appeal has gone mainstream. In Macy's stores, employees spritz incoming shoppers with Om perfume, while Barnes and Noble clerks push "Zen and the Art of Changing Diapers." In a Gatorade spot, Michael Jordan hikes up a mountain in search of a guru and the meaning of life. "Life's a sport," the teacher tells him, "drink it up." Apparently Jordan hasn't read "Sacred Hoops," the Zen tract by Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson.

Salon Daily Clicks: Newsreal

Tue, 22 Apr 1997 19:00:00 +0000

Timothy Leary's cremains have boldly gone where no man has ever gone before.

Early yesterday morning, a winged Pegasus XL solid-fuel rocket hitching a ride on the underbelly of a Lockheed L-1011 jumbo jet ignited at 39,000 feet above Spain's Gando Air Force Base on the Canary Islands and delivered a MINISAT research satellite owned by the Spanish government into orbit 300 miles above Earth.

On the way the Pegasus also sloughed off a canister owned by Houston-based Celestis Inc. containing "the individually encapsulated cremated remains" of 24 former human beings. Seven grams of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry were strapped in this 9-by-12-inch mausoleum. Another lipstick-sized aluminum capsule was reserved for a quarter ounce of Leary.

After learning he had terminal prostate cancer, the LSD guru had vowed to "give death a better name or die trying." Would he commit "directed de-animation" live on the Web? Or have his head cut off and frozen? No and no. He died in his sleep and was privately cremated -- a rather conventional coda from a man who had excoriated traditional modes for much of his life.