Don't Worry, Be Happy

In every life we have some trouble
But when you worry you make it double
Don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy now

Music & lyrics by Bobby McFerrin

Taken from the words on a poster of the silent smiling guru Meher Baba, Bobby McFerrin's a capella song, a hit record in 1988, is good advice as well as a succinct (though probably unintended) summation of the Buddha's teaching. Worrying about the inevitable anxieties of life just makes them worse. Wisdom like this, with perhaps an academic twist, will be offered at the 3rd international conference on Gross National Happiness which will be held next week at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. The GNH index was invented in 1972 by Bhutan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck as a way to define life in a more spiritual and psychological sense than the economic Gross National Product (GNP) can. The four pillars of GNH are the promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance. Conferences in 2005 and 2006 were held in Nova Scotia and Japan.

With happiness as my goal, I set out last Friday to visit Koh Samet, a small island in the Gulf of Thailand just off the coast, 4.5 kilometers from the port of Ban Phe in Rayong Province, itself a three-hour bus ride from Bangkok. Samet, named after a ubiquitous tree (also called cajeput, a member of the eucalyptus family) found on the island which is used for everything from medicine to boat building (not to mention producing an aromatic oil), is popular with Thais as well as tourists. In 1981 it was included in the Khao Laem Ya-Mu Koh Samet National Park. This means, among other things, that foreign visitors must pay a 400-baht entrance fee (only 40 baht for Thais). Unfortunately, becoming a park hasn't stopped development of the fragile ecosystem and some of the pristine beaches resemble strip malls full of bungalows, bars and restaurants.

The island (sometimes spelled "Samed") is famous because it is supposed to be the setting for much of the epic poem, Phra Aphai Mani, written by Thailand's Shakespeare, Sunthorn Phu. Born during the reign of Rama I in the late 18th century, the writer led a colorful life which included imprisonment for an affair with a lady at court. Released to marry the woman, he was appointed court poet before becoming an alcoholic, losing his wife and going to jail for fighting. He began his long poem in prison and published it in installments over 20 years. The story follows the title character, Prince Aphai Mani, a hero of Byronic proportions, in his romantic adventures throughout ancient Siam. On Ko Kaew Phitsadan ("vast jewel island," a reference to the white sand), the prince is rescued with the help of a mermaid from the clutches of a female giant whom he defeats by playing a magic flute, and the mermaid and he have a son named Sudsakorn who spends much of the poem looking for his father who has gone missing. A cheesy statue of the prince and his mermaid wife sits on rocks at the end of Hat Sai Kaew, "Diamond Sand Beach," the largest of the 13 coves (ao) or beaches on the east side of the island (the west is mostly barren with only a couple of resorts).

At Ekamai bus station in Bangkok I was able to get a round-trip ticket on both the bus and the ferry from Ban Phe to the island for under $10. A steward provided water and a hand towel, and we were treated to a gory slasher film, "The Hills Have Eyes II," dubbed in Thai, on the overhead TV. There was a short wait for the ferry, which would not leave until it had at least 20 passengers, and the crossing in the ancient boat was smooth. Koh Samet is shaped like a P and most of the ferries arrive at Na Dan pier on the north shore. Passengers are greeted by a fleet of green pickups that serve as buses, and, after paying the entrance fee, we headed south on a bumpy dirt road My destination was Ao Pudsin (or Ao Tub Tim, depending on which of the two places you choose to stay), where I had reserved a funky driftwood bungalow with shower (cold) and fan, and a stupendous view of the sea in front of my porch. A footpath links the beaches and, for reasons mentioned below, I never got father south than the next cove, Ao Nuan.

I am becoming a bit of a connoisseur of Thai beach destinations, having visited Koh Samui, Phuket and Pattaya (it's a hard job but somebody...you know the cliché). The first thing you notice about Koh Samet is the heavy presence of Thais, and some of them swimming in bathing suits and not their clothes. In addition, this is family-friendly island and there were kids everywhere (I watched one five-year-old boy diligently attempting to dig an anchor out of the sand where the speedboat driver had dropped it before heading off to get something). Farang and Thai children played together in the surf and built sand castles with buckets. And there were almost as many dogs, sleeping on the sand and chasing frisbees. There are bars, mostly attached to resorts, but no discernible bar scene like in Pattaya or Phuket's Patong Beach.

What there is is one long party, from all manner of water sports during the day (including parasailing and surf paddle tennis) to fireworks, outdoor dining, hot air balloons (the small kind, powered by a candle), and fire shows at night. At dusk the deck chairs and umbrellas along the beaches are replaced by mats, Thai pillows and low tables with candles for lighting. Some of the bars, Like the one attached to Naga's Bungalows, feature special prices on drinks (Ladies Night!) and advertise movies to watch. We picked Ploy Talay ("jewel of the sea") Restaurant and grabbed a front row table for the advertised fire show. After dishes of crab, shrimp and clams, washed down with beer, we listened to a cover band from the Philippines and watched fellow diners sucking on hookah pipes (quite a popular addition to the traditional menu). To the north of us, amateur and some more professional fireworks lit up the night sky. Off the coast we could see the lights of fishing boats. And south of us the small balloons (more like lamp shades) rose toward the half moon ("only 250 baht and good luck for you!"). Above our heads a large-screen TV relayed a soccer match from far away. A steady stream of revelers strolled up and down the brightly-lit beach, including an elderly woman, all sinews and bone, whom we nicknamed "The Walker" for her non-stop power walks back and forth from Hat Pudsan to Hat Sai Keaw, a distance of several kilometers.





The Ploy fire show was spectacular (you can see for yourself, and mine is not the only YouTube video of it). Nine performers, the youngest in the low teens, twirled flaming batons and fiery balls at the end of chains to produce a dazzling array of moving images. Playing with fire is universal now. My daughter Molly performed in a fire show at a club in Santa Cruz. And I believe fire shows are popular at Burning Man (maybe the first "man" made a costly mistake?). Several of the boys had bandages on their arms, and all were soaked with sweat and soot by the time the show ended. But they were clearly having a good time. Their tips were richly deserved.

So what does it take to find happiness? It can't be just a matter of sensual pleasure. Besides, the senses become dull and blunted with time. And it isn't just a matter of creature comfort. For much of the weekend I was snuffling and coughing with a cold. And Saturday night I realized the mistake of not using sun block. My chest, back and shoulders were red as a lobster even though I'd pointedly sat in the shade (playing in the water without protection was a mistake). Because of the sunburn, I decided not to hike in the sun the next day south to Ao Wong Deuan, the second largest beach on the island. But none of that dimmed the happiness I felt while spending an idyllic weekend in this tropical island paradise. Even though the rich DO live better than the poor, it didn't cost me all that much money (under $150 I suspect). Perhaps as an elderly retired gent, it's the happiness that comes with an absence of day-to-day stress and the typical concerns of settled life (is there enough gas in the car?). Being single, I have no one to think about except myself. I'm not sure that everyone would appreciate the uncertainties and daily puzzles of travel abroad, living out of a suitcase, but I am thriving . Life in Thailand is infinitely fascinating. And I find that even being unable to speak the language, which means that the simplest signs are mystifying -- being constantly out of control -- is exhilarating. When asked, I can truly say these days that I am happy.

Is Religious Faith Irrational?

The New Atheists -- Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris -- seem united in their belief that religious faith is irrational (and therefore dangerous). Reason is equated with science and science requires evidence to prove or disprove a hypothesis. Supernatural agents, by definition, can be neither proved nor disproved. In the absence of evidence of a supernatural God (or gods), faith can only be irrational and therefore must be abandoned.

The black-and-white dichotomy of faith vs. reason makes me uncomfortable. "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy," Shakespeare's Hamlet tells his friend Horatio, who finds it hard to believe in the ghost of Hamlet's father. Faith, according to Hebrews 11, is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." But, "Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope" (1 Peter 3:15). I reach for scriptural support because the debate over faith vs. reason, one of the oldest in theology, is giving me grief as I pour over the texts of the New Atheists.

For a growing number of people coming out of the closet as atheists or secularists, this is a non-issue. There are no supernatural agents, period. The universe began with a big bang, and the variety and complexity of life on earth can be explained adequately by the process of natural selection discovered by Darwin. Religions were created by human beings to provide explanations for the unknown, encourage solidarity within a community, and dictate a standard of morality to prevent conflict. Calling on the "Divine" is a trick to secure obedience to authority, and often religious and political authority were one and the same.

Where does that leave the spiritual but not religious? I have struggled with traditional definitions of religion throughout my life and in this blog. For the philosopher Daniel Dennett, religions are "social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” His definition does not include "cafeteria Catholics" like me who pick and choose among the dogmas offered to come up with our own mix. "If what you hold sacred is not any kind of Person you could pray to, or consider to be an appropriate recipient of gratitude (or anger, when a loved one is senselessly killed), you’re an atheist in my book.” OK, I'm an atheist.

Richard Dawkins takes a different approach. Rather than begin with religion (which he will try to define as a by-product of other more useful evolutionary traits like respect for authority), he opens his book with the "God Hypothesis" which says: "There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us." God in this sense, Dawkins says, is a delusion, "a pernicious delusion." Writing critically of the New Atheists in the London Guardian, Madeleine Bunting acknowledges that "scientists have argued that faith was a byproduct of our development of the imagination or a way of increasing the social bonding mechanisms. Does that make religion an important evolutionary step but now no longer needed - the equivalent of the appendix?" OK, I agree. I cannot believe in, nor have faith in, such an outdated supernatural agent. The god with white hair and a long beard who sits in the sky and judges us is dead, as Nietzsche pointed out long ago.

I would rather see faith and reason both as conceptual tools we humans use to explain and understand the data we receive from our senses. As Stanley Fish observed in a discussion of the New Atheists in the New York Times, "the distinction informing so many of the atheists’ arguments, the distinction between a discourse supported by reason and a discourse supported by faith, will not hold up because any form of thought is an inextricable mix of both; faith and reasons come together in an indissoluble package.” I remember reading philosopher Michael Polanyi who pointed out that the opposite of reason is not the irrational but the non-rational, a belief or perception that is more or less reasonable, based on probability rather than firm evidence. Love and beauty are among the things we know by non-rational "tacit knowing," according to Polanyi.

A surprising opponent of Dawkins was the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton who wrote in the London Review of Books that even the scientist "lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’."

Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself.

Religion and science, then, are two separate realms of discourse. Scientist Freeman Dyson, in his review of Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, stakes frankly his own prejudices:

As human beings, we are groping for knowledge and understanding of the strange universe into which we are born. We have many ways of understanding, of which science is only one. Our thought processes are only partially based on logic, and are inextricably mixed with emotions and desires and social interactions. We cannot live as isolated intelligences, but only as members of a working community. Our ways of understanding have been collective, beginning with the stories that we told each other around the fire when we lived in caves. Our ways today are still collective, including literature, history, art, music, religion, and science. Science is a particular bunch of tools that have been conspicuously successful for understanding and manipulating the material universe. Religion is another bunch of tools, giving us hints of a mental or spiritual universe that transcends the material universe. To understand religion, it is necessary to explore it from the inside, as William James explored it in The Varieties of Religious Experience. The testimony of saints and mystics...is the raw material out of which a deeper understanding of religion may grow.

Leon Wieseltier in the New York Times called Dennett's book "a fairy tale told by evolutionary biology. There is no scientific foundation for its scientistic narrative…what he has written is just an extravagant speculation based upon his hope for what is the case, a pious account of his own atheistic longing.

And what of mystical knowledge, that chimera on which I've pinned my hopes for many years, seeking to develop a spiritual practice that would allow me to break out of the time-bound self to experience "Truth"? Support for this comes from a strange source, Sam Harris's book The End of Faith, the first of the New Atheist gospels. “Mysticism is a rational enterprise, religion is not,” he writes in the book's final chapter where he discusses his own practice of meditation. But this drew fire from his own tribe. Meera Nanda, writing in The New Humanist, says that the "bilious attack on faith, the aspect of the book which has received all the attention, only sets the stage for what seems to be his real goal: a defense, nay, a celebration of Harris' own Dzogchen Buddhist and Advaita Vedantic Hindu spirituality." Nanda, who grew up a Hindu and rejected it, writes that

Harris appears oblivious to the authoritarian implications of the one-ness he worships. Shedding one's 'I-ness' is a recipe for group-think and authoritarianism. The individual in her everyday life is treated as an illusion of no consequence when seen from the mystical highground of one-ness. Of course the Gnostic vision of one-ness is not supposed to be available to all. The enlightened have always constituted a spiritual aristocracy in deeply unequal Eastern societies. When one-ness is made into the highest religious ideal you get the 'holism' of caste society.

To defend his advocacy of "rational mysticism" from such criticism, Harris published an explanation in Free Inquiry. Meditation, he writes, "is nothing more than a method of paying extraordinarily close attention to one’s moment-to-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this." It is the only basis upon which we can make first-person claims about subjectivity.

Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.

Arguing that this is not "New Age mumbo jumbo," Harris says that "any serious practitioner of meditation knows, there is something to the claims that have been made by mystics over the ages…there is a kernel of truth in the grandiosity and otherworldly language of religion."

This is an astounding statement from one of the quartet of New Atheists, and one I am not sure Dawkins and Dennett, who both praised Harris highly for his book, as well as Hitchens, would agree. Harris ends his book with this gentle dichotomy:

The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil's masterpiece.

"As long as there are no decisive arguments for or against the existence of God," writes Jim Holt, reviewing Dawkins' book in the New York Times, "a certain number of smart people will go on believing in him, just as smart people reflexively believe in other things for which they have no knock-down philosophical arguments, like free will, or objective values, or the existence of other minds." It is poignant to think, Holt continues,

that believers will never discover that they are wrong, whereas Dawkins and fellow atheists will never discover that they are right. As for those in between — ranging from agnostics to “spiritual” types for whom religion is not so much a metaphysical proposition as it is a way of life, illustrated by stories and enhanced by rituals — they might take consolation in the wise words of the Rev. Andrew Mackerel, the hero of Peter De Vries’s 1958 comic novel The Mackerel Plaza: “It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.”

In his blog last month, Cyprian Consiglio writes about an anonymous Carthusian monk who thinks "in one sense only the atheist can truly believe in God; meaning, he thought that for all of us God has to die at a certain moment." In "The Wound of Love," the monk goes on to list the God that must die:

the God who stands alongside the cosmos as some ‘thing’ else,
the God who stands alongside my neighbor as someone else;
the God of whom it suffices to know the general moral rules
in order to do his will;
the God infinitely above creatures' pains
in a transcendence beyond reach;
the God-judge, who punishes in accord with
a justice conceived along human lines;
the God who blocks the spontaneity of life and love.

Cyprian comments: "But the one that sticks in my craw is this: he says that the God of our imagination must die too, the God of our projections and desires must die because that God is quite often nothing other than our own ego deified." Perhaps through meditation, what the Christian mystics also call contemplation, it is possible, as Harris argues, to see through the conventional sense of "self," the "self deified," and behold the wisdom of the mystics.

I remain on the fence, poised between the dark chasm of the scientific reductionist's brute materialism, and the blind faith of the true believer who is forever bowing to authority and subject to almost certain manipulation by unscrupulous gurus and priests. How can we distinguish between personal faith (given that "the self" is a tenuous and limited construction) and religion as a social system, created by humans and containing the faults of any institution? A plague on all their houses?

I am not sure, but I think this excursion into atheism, this exercise of stripping away all certainties, all religious and spiritual beliefs, all conventional "God talk," is beneficial and healthy. These gods must die. During my retreat next month at Shantivanam in India I hope to find my own level of reasonable faith from the bedrock up.

This weekend: an idyll on the island of Koh Samet.

It's Easy Being Green

Thais seemed surprised that I did not know the day on which I was born. For them the day is more important than the date. So I went to the internet which knows all and discovered that my birth day was Wednesday. Ah! said the Thais. Your color then is green.

Whoop ti do. I've always liked green. It's the color of nature, the hue of an environmentalist. Does this mean I need a new wardrobe?

Thais color-code the week. You can almost tell what day it is simply by seeing what colors people are wearing. According to Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture, "The tradition originated with astrologically-divined battle tunics before being taken up by the court and those who could afford a diverse wardrobe." Thai day names relate to the gods of the planets in ancient India astrology, each of which has a color.

Sunday is red for the sun god Phra Arthit. Monday is yellow for the moon god Phra Chan. Tuesday is pink for the Mars god Phra Angkarn. Wednesday is green for the Mercury god Phra Phut. Thursday is orange for the Jupiter god Phra Pareuhat. Friday is sky blue for the Venus god Phra Suk. Saturday is violet for the Saturn god Phra Sao.

I learned about yellow first because a large percentage of Thais wear yellow shirts on Monday to pay their respects to the King who was born on a Monday (his wife, the queen, was born on a Friday and Thais wear blue every Friday to honor her). The practice of donning yellow began two years ago to celebrate the anniversary of his ascension to the throne 60 years ago. Now it marks the King's birthday year, an event that will be culminated on December 5th. I decided to buy one and a week ago went to Robinson's, a large chain department store with an outlet on Sukhumvit. All the brands make yellow shirts for the Thai market. I opted not to pay over $30 to Arrow and bought a locally-made one on sale for around $10. Last Monday I went out in public for the first time in my new shirt. As I passed the massage parlor up the soi from my home, one of the girls said: "Oh, he loves our king too!" It felt strange to pass among the crowds of Thais not as a stranger, a farang tourist, but as a member of the community.

But an even stranger thing has happened. Last Wednesday, by all rights a green day, the king was released from the hospital where he had been recuperating from a blood clot in the brain. He wore a pink shirt and a pink jacket, and photos of this unprecedented sartorial event were prominently displayed in all the newspapers, Thai and English. Had he planned to be released the day before, Tuesday, a pink day? Thousands of his subjects were waiting outside the hospital to cheer him upon his release. Almost all were wearing yellow shorts. From the Bangkok Post:

Pink is the new yellow in Thailand as revered 79-year-old king sparks new fashion trend

"People across Thailand have started wearing pink shirts in tribute to their beloved 79-year-old king, who checked out of a hospital this week dressed in a blazer and a dress shirt of that color."

"Astrologers have determined pink to be an auspicious color for the king's 80th year... A royal emblem, using pink among other colors, was specially designed for his birthday. Pink T-shirts went on sale earlier this year, just after the emblem was designed. But business is expected to boom following the king's recent public appearance leaving the hospital."

Manufacturers report a run on pink material and stores quickly sold out of their existing stocks of pink clothes. On Sunday, Ajahn Amma, doyen of the abhidhamma class, was dressed in pink, and she explained that pink was exceptionally good for healing (the abhidhamma texts, Buddhism's equivalent of reductionist science, cover subjects of this sort).

Pink has never been my color, and I don't expect to jump on board this trend. But I am looking for a nice green shirt to mark my natal day.


It's not easy writing about politics in the United States while I'm living in Thailand. I'm too far removed to care as deeply about political issues (and the poor selection of candidates pandering for votes in the current selection campaign) as I did when living in Santa Cruz and participating in demonstrations against the Bush administration and its misbegotten wars in the Middle East (I include Israel where U.S. support has prolonged the misery of the Palestinian people). This photo, however, gave me pause. Last week Bush visited the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, where amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan reportedly receive better care than at Walter Reed, the military hospital racked by scandal when its poor treatment of veterans was publicized. I'd like to know what this badly scarred soldier is telling his commander-in-chief. In other photos, Bush can be seen with horribly mutilated vets. Does he have a twinge of conscience? Does he feel any responsibility? Is he human?

Last week I saw "Lions for Lambs," the heavily criticized film from Robert Redford who attempts, with the aid of superstars Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, to make a strong case against politicians, the media, and alienated youth. Redford plays a college professor (would that I were he!), Cruise a smarmy Republican, and Streep is excellent as a journalist who comes to the realization that she has contributed to the present chaos. Opening in Bangkok the same day as it did in the U.S. (a rare occurrence), the film fails to engage the audience (me) as drama but talks and preaches what any thinking person must know, that politicians misuse the media for their personal ends, that journalists were complicit in the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascoes, and that while some college students pursue ideals (making sacrifices in vain), most of the others could care less about anything other than partying (my 18-year-old students at UC Santa Cruz largely lived up to the stereotype). At least Hollywood is trying these days to be relevant, with "Babel," "Rendition," "In the Valley of Elah," "Michael Clayton" and others (I can only read the net, none of the newer films having come here yet). I respect Redford and it's a shame his collaboration with screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan (who also wrote "The Kingdom" which is showing her -- I have not seen it) does not tug at the heart as well as the head (recall "Network" which still resonates as criticism of the media).

Some of the best protests against the terrorist wars are contained in documentaries which have reached a new standard set by master protester Michael Moore. Among the best have been "Gunner Palace," "Iraq in Fragments" and "The War Tapes." Recently I saw "No End in Sight," an excellent film about Iraq written and directed by Charles Ferguson, a former political science scholar at M.I.T. (and a dot.com millionaire) turned documentarian because of his disgust for the war. The film focuses on events after "Mission Accomplished" when the U.S. was supposedly stabilizing and reconstructing the damaged country. In it, Ferguson documents the catastrophic decision of Bush appointee L. Paul Bremmer to de-Bathify the government and disband the military, thereby putting a half million men, many with guns, out of work. Ideology trumped expertise. The insurgency gained momentum which has yet to stop with that disastrous policy, one which was universally criticized by Americans working in Iraq and even by the U.S. military, as Ferguson's film clearly shows. From this distance, it is difficult to understand why Americans do not seem to respond to the greatest threat to freedom and democracy since the Civil War. A country pacified by infotainment and technological toys rolls over and plays dead. But then, as Howard Zinn has amply documented, "freedom" and "democracy" are pretty much myths in a land where greed and corruption prevail.

Far away, under the watchful eye of the military, Thais watch as the election campaign builds up steam. The bewildering number of parties and politicans has me baffled. The other day at Bumrungrad Hospital, as I waited to have my chloresterol levels checked, I watched what looked like a game show on the lobby TV, with lovely ladies taking numbers out of a box and data being posted on a large board. I learned from the paper the next day that it was a process whereby candidates were given places on the ballots in provincial elections. At least I think that's what was happening. I was distracted at Bumrungrad by the Christmas music on the PA system, "chestnuts roasting," and all that. Why do the Thais love "our" holidays so much? Halloween was a big deal, particularly in the department stores. I saw a giant Christmas tree being erected outside the Emporium yesterday. Christmas music can also be heard at all the Starbucks branches (there must be thousands in Bangkok alone) where they are selling "Pass the Cheer" special concoctions. Stores are putting up colored Christmas lights (or are they just a version of the weekly colors?).

One thing you notice about the Bangkok Skytrain, besides the total absence of graffitti, is that no matter how crowded the cars might be (and I rarely get a seat), no one pushes. Crowds are amazingly polite. I think touching is a no-no in Thai culture (public displays of affection, outside of park lawns, is rare), and so passengers make a great effort not to jostle and prod their neighbors. People stand politely on the platform to the side of the doors until all of the car's occupants leave. I took this for granted until last week when I ran into several Indian women in saris while exiting a car. They were determined to get on before I got off and smashed into me with a vengeance. Remind me to never take a subway in Delhi.

Very Thai is full of good information about Thai street culture and urban legends. Besides explaining the colors of the week, author Philip Cornwel-Smith unravels the mystery behind little pink napkins, drinks in a bag, insect treats and power drinks. He discusses Muay Thai and katoeys, the sniff kiss and amulet collectors. It's a wonderful book, full of great photos by the author and John Goss which put my humble efforts to shame. I would keep it in my bathroom for meditative reading if it weren't for the fact that the room gets soaked whenever I take a shower. But every now and then I uncover a mystery that Very Thai does not seem to notice. For example, why can I not find a scotch tape dispenser? Tape is widely available, but never with the little plastic dispensers you find in the States. No one I've asked can give me a good answer. Another mystery is the absence of paper towels. Where you usually find it in America, next to the toilet paper in the markets, it is missing. Instead, I buy paper napkins, but they're not the same. What sort of cultural or economic prohibition might prevent the sale of paper towels?

This morning, while waiting on the sidewalk at 6:30 for a taxi to take my friend to work, a couple of monks came walking up Soi 4 with their begging bowls. I had not seen monks on pindabat in the neighborhood before, since there is no Buddhist temple I know of nearby. I had no sticky rice to give them, and it didn't look as if they were having much luck. So we stuck 20 baht notes in their bowls while kneeling and wai'ing. They were amazingly grateful and treated us to a chanted blessing and some dayglo orange wrist bracelets. It turns out they are trying to travel south and we were the first to offer them money. In the deep south of Thailand, however, Muslim separatists are assassinating school teachers and policemen. I pray their journey is a short one!

Is That All There Is?

Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is

Written and sung by Peggy Lee

In my bleakest moments, this is the question that I ask. Who am I and what am I supposed to do in this world into which I've been thrown? Is this or that all there is?

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the other provocative proponents of the "New Atheism" movement say yes. There is no god, no inexplicable mystery and no supernatural escape from the vagaries of matter in motion. We humans and the present natural world are the end result of natural selection, the process described by Darwin, which is all we need to understand the evolution from simplicity to complexity. Evolution and not an intelligent designer produced the world. What we make of it is a psychological, social and political question, not a religious one.

Who does that answer satisfy? I've been looking for metaphysical solutions to the conundrum of existence for most of my adult life. In my youth it was flying saucers and Theosophy, in middle age , General Semantics, quantum physics and est, and now I've settled on a mix of insights from Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism to quell my curiosity. The answers won't last. They never do.

The respective positions are oversimplified by their opponents: Faith vs. reason, superstition vs. the scientific method, myth vs. reality, deed vs. creed, evolution vs. creationism (AKA intelligent design), etc. [insert here your favorite binary oppositions] The funny thing is, I find myself swayed by whomever I am reading. The writings of Thomas Merton and many others persuaded me that there is a divine dimension to reality that science cannot detect. But while reading The God Delusion and God is Not Great during the past week I found myself laughing along with Dawkins and Hitchens and agreeing with their trenchant criticisms of religion.

I've never thought that one's religious practice or spiritual path is primarily a matter of belief, of assent to linguistic propositions. The churches, temples, synagogues and mosques are full of people striving to be good according to the dictates of their faith tradition. They participate in long-hallowed rituals and rites, hoping to heal and cleanse themselves of imperfections through chants, songs, recitations and prayers. The test of faith for me has always been its evidence in the world. Through a relationship with the divine, faith begets good works: God-intoxicated people feed the hungry, clothe the poor and take care of the sick.

The New Atheists, on the contrary, believe that "religion is poison" (Hitchens) and that the religious education of the young is child abuse. Believers in God down through history have been more likely to commit evil in the name of their Lord or Prophet. The Crusades, Inquisition, Jihad -- name your crime and religion was behind it. Even the moderately religious are complicit, according to Sam Harris, because they provide excuses and give cover to fundamentalists for extremism. The critics ask: Why is religious faith privileged in polite discussion? Such excessive tolerance is tantamount to condoning terrorism in the name of God or Allah.

Like Dawkins, et al, I am scared of religious fundamentalism, whether from the no-nothing Christian right-wing hordes that permitted George Bush to hijack America or from Muslim fanatics who blow themselves and others up to win entry into Paradise. Since the French Enlightenment, atheists have become increasingly vocal, according to Jonathan Miller's comprehensive and insightful BBC-TV documentary, "A Rough Guide to Disbelief." But despite the success of science and technology to explain and exploit the natural world, people today seem to be MORE religious rather than LESS. While the global corporate economy homogenizes the world, populations fragment into ethnicities with competing religious identities. How many can explain the different between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims?

Without fully understanding how natural selection works, I am satisfied that the earth was created billions of years ago, and not four or six thousand, as the fundamentalists believe. My belief has more in common with the deists who see God as a first principle rather than a meddlesome divinity who listens to and answers individual prayers, or who saves some from calamitous accidents but condemns others to random mutilation and death. I cling to the idea of purpose in the universe and search for evidence in manifestations of love and beauty rather than in things.

When it comes to living in the world, I suspect there is not much difference between me and the New Atheists. I do not think you need to believe in God to be good. And, as Dawkins and Hitchens argue, people who claim direction from God are often very bad. There is a social and political dimension to morality often missed by the religious (like the pro-lifers who ignore the plight of hungry kids or who advocate the death penalty). Religion is concerned with why the world is, and what we should do, and science with how the world is and what we can do.

All of this sidesteps a discussion about religious institutions, hierarchy and authority. Without Constantine, Christianity (if it existed at all) might look very different. If religion is a cultural universal, it appears almost invariably hand-in-glove with authority, and has been used to justify subservience and oppression. The Spanish conquerors of America carried a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other. Plantation owners in the south used Christianity to pacify their slaves. The horror story goes on. But not always. Liberation theology in Latin America inspired peasants to overthrow military regimes supported by the Catholic church. Followers of the social Gospel sought a this-worldly Kingdom of God rather than one with rewards and punishments in the next. The abolitionist and civil rights movements in America were led by faithful Christians.

An evolutionary psychologist told Madeleine Bunting, who reviewed Hitchens' book critically in the London Guardian last spring, that the "durability and near universality of religion is one of the most enduring conundrums of evolutionary thinking.” Some of the New Atheists make a stab at it. Dawkins thinks it might be the by-product of useful behavior, like obedience in children. "But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility," Dawkins writes, which could lead to religious faith. Another possible cause is that children innately assign purpose to everything, and this could lead in maturity to "viruses of the mind" that imagine a divine purpose dictated by a creator. Even love, misfiring, is a cause. "Could irrational religion be a by-product of the irrationality mechanisms that were originally built into the brain by selection for falling in love?"

At the beginning of next month, some of us will gather in Bangkok to view Dawkins' excellent two-part BBC documentary, "Root of All Evil?", and discuss the pros and cons of supernatural explanations and descriptions of reality. One member of our sangha has already said that he believes in the metaphysical beings described in some Buddhist texts, and that he thinks an exploration of the atheist position will be of no use to his Buddhist practice. Perhaps. Certainly the bare bones of the Buddha's teaching is existential and experiential; he tells us that his words must be tested in practice and not blindly believed. Indeed, he seemed to have little patience for the big questions about cosmology and ontology, and perhaps would have found debate about the existence or non-existence of God irrelevant for the path to enlightenment.

For me, the question of God has most often been a linguistic question: Is the word "God" meaningful? If it stands for a being, with all the characteristics of a person, then I cannot believe. Some I respect, including Martin Buber, think of God as a relationship rather than a thing, and point to the idea of the Trinity which symbolizes that divine community which includes the believer as well. Jose Miranda, the liberation theologian, wrote that "God comes to be in an act of justice," which makes "God" a verb rather than a noun. I feel as if my intellectual and spiritual world would be impoverished if I were denied the language of faith and belief, but this is not the same as affirming any dogmas of Christianity (why do we unify this as a Religion when clearly the competing sectarian definitions are so different?).

It is good to listen to the critique of the New Atheists, hysterical though their language seems at time, just as it is good to have an annual spring cleaning of the mind to determine what ideas and thoughts are important and which ones can be discarded as fossilized and arthritic holdovers from the past.

Missing the Boats

No, I did not attend Monday's spectacular and colorful Royal Barges procession on the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok. The expected crowds and the difficulties of travel when roads and river traffic are closed dissuaded me. More than 50 barges and 2000 participants traveled down the river to Wat Arun where His Royal Highness Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, subbing for his father the King who is in hospital, presented the Royal Krathin Robes to monks at the Temple of Dawn, marking the end of Buddhist Lent. But I did visit the famous wat last Saturday, crossing the river on a ferry from Bangkok proper, where I took the panoramic picture above of the river (you can see Wat Pho on the further shore where the famous Reclining Buddha is housed) from near the top of the Khmer-style temple tower. The site was established after the fall of Ayuthaya and before the capital was moved east across the river to Bangkok. The Buddhist temple, named after the Indian god of dawn (Aruna), is the third place of pilgrimage in the holy trinity of Wat Pho and Wat Phra Kaew in the Grand Palace which houses the Emerald Buddha. Construction of the present temple was begun by Rama II in the early 19th century and finished by his successor. It features beautiful mosaics, some using broken Chinese porcelain from the ballast of Chinese ships calling at the port of Bangkok. Given the rare occurrence of the Royal Barges procession, I am sorry that I did not make the effort to see it. But I have been doing my best lately to tick off all the important attractions for visitors in this infinitely fascinating capital of Thailand.

Also on Saturday I visited the Art Deco Democracy Monument which was constructed in 1932 to mark the transition from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy. Surprisingly, the designer was Corrado Feroci who cut his teeth on monuments for Italian dictator Mussolini. Feroci buried 75 canon balls in the base to mark the Buddhist Era (BE) year 2475 (dated from the Buddha's enlightenment), or 1932 in the west. In recent years, the monument has been a rallying point for public demonstrations against recurring military coups, most notably in 1992 when several hundred protesters were believed killed. After visiting Wat Arun, I took a taxi south along the west bank of the river to Santa Cruz Church. Descendants of early Portuguese traders, first Europeans in Thailand, built the first church on the site in 1770. Originally called Wat Kudi Jeen, the wooden church was rebuilt in 1835 and renamed Santa Cruz. The present structure was rebuilt in 1913 during the reign of Rama VI. In keeping with Catholic hospitality, the church was locked when I arrived and all I could do was take this photo to mark my visit to the unacknowledged sister church of Holy Cross back in Santa Cruz. Because the ferry was not running on the weekend, I had to walk along the river, splashing over its banks because of unseasonable rains upstream, and across the Phra Buddha Yodfa (Memorial) Bridge, named after the king who was posthumously called Rama I, founder of the Chakri dynasty which rules today. My goal was the Pak Khlong Talat (Flower Market) at the foot of the bridge where several streets were filled with stalls and vendors selling flowers for rituals and beauty. Roses were dirt cheap and older ones were stacked up on the sidewalk to be given away free. I saw monks buying lotus buds for their temples, and mounds of orange and white blossoms to be made into garlands for home and business altars. Reputed to be the best-smelling market in Bangkok, my pitiful nasal glands were not up to the challenge and I had to rely on my companion to point me toward bouquets with the best aromas. I bought a half dozen red roses and a vase in which to put them so that I might add a little color to my off-white room.


Last week I went to visit Wat Yannawa with Phra Pandit to explore the possibility of using one of the temple's rooms for our discussions about Buddhism, psychology, and the criticism of religion by the new cadre of atheists. It is right next to the Saphan Taksin Skytrain station on the river. I've since learned that Wat Yannawa was built in the early 19th century in a predominantly Chinese neighborhood. The centerpiece is a wiharn for Buddha images in the shape of a Chinese junk. It was constructed of cement at the direction of King Rama III because steam ships were replacing the old junks, and he wanted people to remember the old ships that had bought prosperity to the kingdom. The 'ship' contains two chedis where the masts would normally be, and there is an altar in the wheel house above the stern. Across the street from the temple complex is the shell of a skyscraper, one of many that can be seen over the Bangkok landscape. When Asian economies collapsed during the dot com crash of the 1990s, many construction projects went bankrupt. Even though the many-storied building seems not far from completion, no one took it over and it stands like a sentinel to remind people of the vagaries of the global economy. What would have happened to the neighborhood had the baht remained stable and investors secure? Now there is a chaos of stalls and impromptu shops around the entrance to what might have been an upscale office or condominium building. It's now probably too expensive to take the derelict down so it will remain until the Apocalypse.

On Sunday I returned to Benjakiti Park where I captured this peaceful scene in the center of the city. The park is a short walk from my apartment, made longer because the nearest gate is always inexplicably locked. It's necessary to traipse through a Thai residential block of wooden houses, sleeping dogs and playing children, and up a hidden path to Ratchadaphisek Road around the corner from one of the two open gates. Maybe this difficulty of access accounts for the paucity of people enjoying the beautiful facilities. At the south end of the park is Queen Sirikit International Convention Center where I grabbed a breakfast snack before wandering the packed halls of the "Art of Technology" exhibition. It was more like a fire sale, with every conceivable electronic gadget at bargain prices, than a presentation of products. After a short look-see, the empty lawn of the park outside seemed more desirable.

On Tuesday, Dr. Holly and I went on a field trip to visit Wat Dhammamongkol far out on Sukhumvit and a good distance up Soi 101 (I live on Soi 4). We took the Skytrain to the end of the line at On Nut (construction is underway to extend it to the new airport), and jumped in a taxi to see the famed wat with the huge tower and the jade Buddha. When Phra Viriyang Sirintharo, abbot of the temple, arrived in 1963 after 20 years as a forest monk, the area was a swamp (some say the airport was also built on the swamp and it is sinking) where his only neighbors were snakes. The monk was given five Buddha relics by the Supreme Patriarch of Bangladesh in 1979, and he constructed a 95-meter high chedi to house them, a modern version of the Bodhgaya Chedi on the site of the Buddha's enlightenment. Dr. Holly and I took an elevator to the top of the chedi to pay our respects to the relics at the top and enjoy the tremendous view of the east side of Bangkok and the skyscrapers in the distance. On the walls were paintings of the Buddha's teachings on the Four Noble Truths and Dependent Origination. The elaborate altar pictured here on the top floor apparently houses the relics but we could not tell where. On the lower floors of the chedi we saw displays of broken pottery surrounded by money in international denominations, a sort of wishing well museum. And there were dozens of different status of the Buddha in all of his/her permutations.

From the top of the chedi we could see the large Jade Buddha Pavilion below. In 1987 Phra Viriyang had a vision of a jade Buddha, and four years later was able to purchase a 32-ton jade block discovered below the waters of a river in British Columbia. The only carvers he could find were in Carrara, Italy, where marble is the material of choice. Two artists were brought to Thailand, given special equipment to cut the hard jade, and finished the figure in 1994 along with a smaller sculpture of "Guanyin" (I've seen her named spelled many different ways), the Chinese goddess of mercy. Dr. Holly and I entered the Pavilion from below and found a large series of rooms filled with compartments, like different sized post office boxes, for ashes of the deceased. Some doors were quite fancy, others rather plebian; Thailand is, after all, a hierarchical society. Upstairs the large hall built to showcase the beautiful jade sculptures was mostly empty, except for a man sleeping by the window; no one was meditating or praying on a weekday morning. We could hear the shouts of children from the school next door. Next to the Pavilion is the construction skeleton of a huge temple which will eventually replace the existing one at the foot of the chedi. We saw groups of young monks walking single file and followed them to find the souvenir shop where bits of leftover jade were carved into miniature figures for sale. (In the distance behind the monks you can see the chimney of the crematorium.)

Inside the shop we found the indefatigable abbot himself, saying goodbye to monks and workers before traveling to Canada the next day. Phra Viriyang is 87 and since coming out of the forest he has founded, in addition to Wat Dhammamongkol, a dozen other temples in Thailand and five in Canada (plus another in Dallas). His Willpower Institute organizes retreats and promotes a "Meditation for World Peace" project. As a result of his experience looking for artisans outside Thailand, the monk decided to start a design institute in partnership with an Italian organization, and Thais are now able to study fashion design at a school on the ground floor of the chedi. Phra Viriyang gestured to the two farang visitors to kneel beside him and he chatted with us in passable English. Although he leads meditation retreats in Canada, there are no current plans to teach English speakers in Bangkok. Learning about this had been one of the objects of our pilgrimage to the temple. Although disappointed, the trip was nonetheless an unforgettable experience.

Our final destination was Assumption University's Bang Na campus (soon to be changed to Suvarnabhumi campus since it is in the swampy vicinity of the new airport). I wrote about ABAC (its nickname because it was once primarily a business school), or AU, it's initials (the symbol for the mineral gold) when I visited the graduate campus in Hua Mark some distance away where Dr. Holly teaches in the department of psychology. That institution, with its high-rise classroom building and sumptuous gardens around a lake, was impressive. But nothing Holly could say would have prepared me for the spectacular facilities at the undergraduate campus, resembling more a movie set for a faux Europe than the grounds of a university.

The campus is dominated by the "Cathedral of Learning," a 27-story building flanked by palace-like wings containing offices and classrooms (named after the three archangels). The corridors look like they belong to a medieval monastery. Underneath this edifice is a huge mall and food court servicing the 20,000 students, most from middle or upper-income families. Dr. Holly and I had an excellent lunch at a dim sum restaurant (my first taste of this tapas-like Asian cuisine). Another mall is located under the dormitories a short distance away; students travel back and forth via a tram that looks exactly like a San Francisco cable car. Everywhere there are statues of Christian saints. The grounds also contain several lakes, a Buddhist sala and a Catholic church, as well as an auditorium-conference center. I didn't visit the gigantic sports facility that looked set up for an Olympics. Since the campus is miles from anywhere, there are numerous vans and buses in a large transportation center to ferry students between the school and home.

Assumption University was founded by the Brothers of St. Gabriel, a worldwide Catholic religious order, founded in France in 1705 by St. Louis Marie De Montfort. That I'd never heard of them meant little, but I was astounded that a French religious order could have the deep pockets to build two such large university campuses in Thailand. Clearly money was flowing from somewhere. In Europe the old religious orders are dying, the medieval buildings are in decay and cathedrals, patronized by a few old women, have been turned into tourist attractions. But here on the outskirts of Bangkok, on swampy open land that was once rice paddies, Catholic education, and indeed medieval and Italianate religious architecture and iconography, has been resurrected.

All of the students I was told are required to take an ethics course. Since I'd taught environmental ethics in the past and had made ethics the object of some of my research, I looked for textbooks in the bookstore. To my surprise, the course was apparently designed to instill ethical values, ones based neither in Buddhism nor in Christianity (that was at the discretion of the teacher, I learned), rather than teach about ethics. There was no mention of consequentialist or deontological ethics, or even of Aristotle's virtue ethics.

I thought briefly about what it might be like to teach in such an idealized institution. Thai students are taught to memorize and rarely engage in critical thinking unless pushed. Teachers barely make a living wage, but cheap housing facilities are available on the Disneyfied campus surrounded by immaculate groomed lawns, gardens and palm trees. Getting anywhere off the campus would be difficult and expensive. I think it would drive me insane.

Constructing Reality

When I retired from a all-too-brief career as a university lecturer and set out to see the world, I expected to spend my twilight years in hedonistic abandon, taking photos of exotic places, sampling strange foods, and exercising my mind through the consumption of mystery novels. I imagined a little hut on some forgotten beach and a maid, waitress or nurse (perhaps three-in-one?) to serve my every need. What I did not anticipate was intellectual stimulation. I thought I had given that up along with the boxes of academic books that had gone to friends and Goodwill. I had been "caught with my constructs down," as George Kelly would say.

Kelly (1905-67) was a psychologist whose seminal work, The Psychology of Personal Constructs, has been much praised and cited. I had never heard of him until last month when Pandit Bhikku dropped his name into a conversation and said he thought Kelly's concept of constructs had much to offer a dialog between Buddhism and psychology. Yesterday he elaborated on this in a talk for the monthly forum at the World Buddhist University in Bangkok. According to Pandit, constructs are filters, templates or ideological frameworks through which we interpret the world. "The world is real but our frames are creative. Reality is experienced from one or another of these perspectives." Suffering (dukkha spoken of by the Buddha), he proposed, might result from constructs that conflict with the real world. And the fiction of a permanent self, deconstructed by the Buddha, might be a combination of temporary constructs, which, according to Kelly's theory, enable people to anticipate events "by construing their replications." In other words, we act in the world based on our models of how reality works; dysfunctional models lead to unfortunate consequences.

The primary postulate of Kelly's theory of personal constructs is: "A person's processes [experiences, thoughts, feelings, behavior, etc.] are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he [this predates non-gendered language] anticipates events." From this, in his schema, follow 11 corollaries or consequences. Some of this seems abundantly obvious. Humans anticipate the future based on experiences in the past, and these plans are colored by a variety of influences, notably language and culture. The frames through which we perceive reality exclude the unknown and unfamiliar. While Pandit and perhaps Kelly want to argue that reality is real, both concede like Kant that humans can only know phenomena, not the noumena that perhaps lies hidden behind things and facts. The Mystery, if such exists, lies behind the screen.

Pandit gave a number of examples of the cognitive dissonance that can result when our experience of reality does not meet our expectations: the "nice" monk who picks his nose, the meditator with the injured knee forced to sit cross-legged by an unbending teacher, the taxi drivers who alternately construct him as a monk (who can ride free) or a farang (who must pay extra), the noise in the bathroom that can be either benign or a scary spider. Certainly the dukkha that is dis-ease or anxiety can result from unsuitable constructs or unmet anticipations. But is the self simply a bundle of constructs? Kelly seemed to believe that personality was the product of a system of constructs. Apparently he had been called a Zen Buddhist for the absence of an abiding mind in his theory of how the mind works.

The idea of a screen between this bundle of perceptions that is "me" and the "world" with which "I" interact is familiar. I'm not sure what role it plays in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the reigning spirit of psychology these days, but it sounds similar to ideas from gestalt therapy. I was remind of Alfred "The map is not the territory" Korzybski and his theory of General Semantics that I found so interesting when I was in my twenties, and was not surprised to discover through research today that Kelly acknowledged his debt to Korzybski's ideas. I was also reminded of "paradigm," the buzz word of the 1970s, and of hermeneutics, or the study of interpretation, all of which have fascinated me and stirred my curiosity. Someone in the audience saw a connection to Neuro-linguist Programming (NLP) which I've always consider a kind of therapeutic fascism. Kelly, it seems, sought a scientific theory of how humans construct meaning through trial and error, and wanted to turn his patients into scientists who can test their hypotheses (constructs) in the world and follow those with the best predictive power.

One problem that occurred to me was caused by the apparent broadness of the definition of constructs as presented by Pandit. It seemed as if any plan or idea could be called a construct. But if the definition of a construct is too general, then everything becomes a construct and the theory loses its cutting edge. Kelly apparently believed that one's constructs are infinitely flexible and that they can be changed at will. But I wonder how flexible we humans actually are in changing our constructs. Our frames/perspectives/cognitive categories/constructs may not be hard wired, but they are often attached with super glue.

Could Buddhist emptiness, and Hindu non-duality, be the absence of constructs? Pandit posed this question to the gathering . If our self is simply a set of changing constructs, can we let it go through meditation practice and experience the emptiness of a construct-free existence? But this would mean you CAN have direct experience of reality and not just by means of constructs. I think this is a good question and wonder what Kelly's answer would be. From the little I've read, I expect he would answer that the human mind is a construct-making mechanism, and without constructs the mind would cease to exist. That perhaps only happens at death. This inquiry into the nature of enlightenment, with perspectives from Buddhist scriptures and secondary literature, might be very fruitful.

The gathering filled a small seminar room on the third floor of WBU, a center for the teaching of Buddhism in English located at the back of the lovely Benjasiri Park next to Emporium mall. Pandit can be seen here talking to Phra Bart, an American monk from Wat Luang Phor Sodh, a meditation center associated with the WBU several hours from Bangkok. Between them can be seen the bald head of Chris Stanford, a Canadian scholar in charge of programs for the WBU, talking with Daniel Henning, a professor from Montana and author of Buddhism and Deep Ecology.

It shouldn't be so strange that I would find the intellectual half of my soul here in Bangkok after thinking I'd given her up back in California. Gauguin, after all, did not give up art after his move to the South Pacific. Besides mulling over the theories of Kelly, I have been gobbling up recent literature on the renaissance of atheism in light of the rise of dangerous religious fundamentalism in American and the Middle East. The God Delusion by biologist Richard Dawkins was a fascinating read. He illuminates materialism with Darwin's evolutionary insights and has forced me to reexamine my faith in the beauty of Mystery if not of God. Next up: Christopher Hitchens' best-selling God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Later this month we are organizing a seminar on atheism and Buddhism to discuss the ideas in these books and in a collection of recent documentary films. I am looking forward to my month at Shantivanam in India where I will have time to reflect on the changes in my attitudes toward religion and spirituality.

Closely Watched Films

For a movie fanatic like myself, moving to Bangkok is equivalent to a retreat in the desert. In the three months of my sojourn here, I've seen only a handful of films: two Hollywood blockbusters, a couple of classics I surreptitiously downloaded from the net, and several French flicks that played at the Lido, the city's only art house (with multiple screens, I might add). The Hollywood films seem to remain forever, even though, in my experience, the luxury cinema multiplexes are mostly empty. Maybe it takes a long time to make Thai subtitles?

So it was with glee that I learned a screening of "Closely Watched Trains," the classic film by Czech director Jirí Menzel, called one of the all-time 100 Best by Time, would be held at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand. Even better, the director himself would be present to take questions. Jerry snuck me in to the penthouse digs of the FCCT where a crowd of professional expats, many in suits, were tucking in to a pitiful insufficient buffet and looking for the promised Czech alcoholic spirits (a no show). We found seats at the bar with good views of the three TV sets and a big screen, and thoroughly enjoyed the movie, a delightful coming-of-age tale set in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Milos, the young train station employee, suffers from premature ejaculation and a suicide attempt before rising to a heroic action at the end (after finally losing his virginity to a pretty partisan). It won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1968.

I learned too late that Menzel was in Bangkok for a screening of his latest film, "I Served the King of England," at the 5th World Film Festival which ends this weekend. The day before his FCCT dog-and-pony-show (which he has no doubt performed hundreds of times in the forty years since "Trains" was released), I went to the festival at the splashy Esplanade Cineplex on the top floor of a new mall near the Thailand Cultural Center, and chose two films to watch in the afternoon and evening. The first, "Possible Lives," a film from Argentina, was directed by Sandra Gugliotta, and featured a woman who mistakenly finds her missing husband in the desolation of Patagonia. Is he or isn't he? We never find out. The second was "Help Me Eros," a surreal story by Taiwan director Kang-sheng Lee that was neither helpful nor erotic. I almost walked out when the fat lady got in the bathtub full of snakes. But with so little cinema to see here, I didn't want to take chances and miss something. Lee's hero, his brain addled by pot, finally killed himself. Or did he?

I unfortunately missed seeing Menzel's newest film at the festival, failing to realize that it was the veteran director's latest opus and opting for dinner instead. And it came to me during the screening of "Closely Watched Trains" that I'd never seen it before either. Menzel, accompanied by a tall blonde woman clearly half his age, gave short and laconic answers to a few questions from the audience through the medium of an interpreter (though he clearly understood the questions voiced in English). His first film, made when he was in his twenties, was a lucky break, pairing the young student with a popular novel by Bohumil Hrabal (the two went on to collaborate on several other films). Menzel and his fellow directors Milos Foreman and Ján Kadár were praised for initiating the Czech New Wave in cinema. But this springtime of filmmaking ended abruptly when Soviet tanks invaded Prague in 1968. Foreman went to Hollywood where he made "Amadeus" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," while Menzel stayed home, producing small humorous films about Czech life under communism. Today at 69, he continues to act and direct, and to tour the global film festivals with his consistently praised works. He particularly likes Bangkok, it was mentioned, because he was married here three years ago. And when asked how he manages to get funding for his films, he pointed at her and said "my wife takes care of that. Would you turn her down?"