If Old MacDonald had a Farm in Thailand

This would be it...

Last weekend we visited The Scenery Vintage Farm in the hills above Ratchaburi, a three-hour drive from Bangkok.  You can go there virtually on their colorful web site.  The place was packed with Thai tourists eager to participate in the American faux farm experience.  I was amazed to see many similar farm resorts along the road in the hilly area called Suan Phung (bee garden) catering to people on holiday whose idea of a good time is to feed sheep.  The neighboring Swiss Valley Farm  (and "Hip Resort") features a European angle and sports a windmill.  Another resort has a Flintstones theme. (All have Facebook pages.) The road was lined with tour buses and, according to reports, rooms are booked solid.  I may have been the only farang at Scenery Farm.  You can only laugh so long at the irony.

LPN, the conglomerate that manages our condo, Lumpini Place, as well as many others in Bangkok, had organized a day trip and we joined four busloads of travelers to take donations to home for mentally disabled children in the province.  Ratchaburi, which means "City of the King (usually shortened to "Rat-Buri"), stretches from the Gulf of Thailand west to the border of Burma. After unloading our gifts into a pickup truck, we filed across the large campus to the dining hall and watched while the boys and girls arrived for lunch.  I felt a little embarrassed at the "show" as the meal was illuminated by flashes from dozens of cameras, but the kids seemed use to it.  We took turns serving food.  Many of the guests sat down to help the residents eat.  Even those able to eat by themselves seemed to enjoy the attention.  Nan found a girl whose appetite was bottomless.  She had three helpings of rice and chicken and several of soup, and all the kids had left by the time she finished.  Some of the vacant stares on the faces of the children were heart-breaking, and I'm glad the government of Thailand has established such centers.  I couldn't translate the school's official name but you can browse their website (in Thai) here.

After the children ate and returned to their rooms, we sat down for lunch at tables in the auditorium of the school.  The entertainment was a surprise.  While we dined on a delicious meal prepared at the direction of the Lumpini organizers, a group of kathoeys (lady boys) from Ratchaburi put on a fabulous stage show.  Lip-syncing to recorded Thai songs, they wore extravagant costumes and danced with professional aplomb.  Vegas girls could not do it better.  A group of the children followed, although several kept wandering off stage, and the entertainment ended with Lumpini personnel and guests trying their hand at karaoke.

Our next stop on the caravan through Ratchaburi was Baan Hom Thien ("Home of Sweet-smelling Candles") not far away in Suan Phung.  It was the epitome of a manufactured tourist attraction, charging a small fee (paid for in our approximately $10 field trip ticket) for visitors to wander through a lovely hillside garden with stalls offering food and drink and shops selling...candles.  In addition to the wax objects in every size and color, there were numerous wax-sculpted sheep.  For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why sheep (which appear to be rare in Thailand) were the focus.  There were little wax sheep and big wax sheep and sheep on lots of different tee shirts.  There were even small rocking sheep for children to ride on.  We didn't buy any candles but we did get a cold drink and ice cream, each in its own bamboo container (which we brought home as souvenirs).

Our final destination was Scenery Vintage Farm.  Spread out over several acres, the farm included several faux barns, an amusement zone with games and prizes (all cuddly stuffed sheep in different sizes), pony rides, an archery range, a non-working ferris wheel ("Coming Soon!"), several gift stores named "Sheepie Sheep Shop," and a herd of sheep who appeared to be ravenously hungry, eating all of the long green leaves the crowd of temporary farm hands were offering.  In the middle of a field was a giant sculpture of a dog, for no apparent reason.  A sign advertised sheep milk ice cream "coming soon!"  I can pass that up.  It was all quite pleasant and decidedly odd.

Almost every Thai house and business has spirit houses standing outside to placate bad spirits who might want to come inside.  There are usual two, one for Chao tii, the animist "spirit of the place," on four legs, and the other on a taller pedestal for Phra phum, the "spirit of the land," a deva of Hindu origin.  While most are quite traditional, there are some modern innovations and designs near new Bangkok skyscrapers.  The spirit houses at Scenery Farm are radically different and quite strange.  They appeared to me to be copies of adobe houses somewhere in the Southwest U.S.A., far from the typical farm scene depicted elsewhere.

Outside the children's center there was a more typical pair of spirit houses.   It's important to remember that these ubiquitous cultural objects have nothing to do with Buddhism, although they blend seamlessly with the constellation of Thai religiosity.  Before lunch, the children folded their hands and chanted a prayer to the Buddha.  Every room of the school contains a portrait of the King and Queen, no less religious objects.  Taking gifts to the school on our part was an act of generosity, what Thais call "tam boon," the primary religious practice, more central to their faith than meditation (something that puzzles American Buddhists when they come to study in Thailand).

In my blog post yesterday, I attempted to sketch some of my thoughts about differences in Buddhism so great as to challenge the unitary nature of the world religion's name.  Can all of the various manifestations of Buddhism fit in the same big tent?  When I called myself a Catholic, friends who were atheists would accuse me of heresy because I doubted the Incarnation (was Jesus really God?) and the Resurrection; they were more orthodox in their unbelief than I.  Within contemporary Buddhism, there are skeptics like Stephen Batchelor who doubts the common understanding of karma and rebirth, and some would like to banish them (and other secularists, progressives, punks and pragmatists) from the Buddhist tent.  Who or what determines Buddhist and the authenticity of teachings of the dhamma/dharma?  Traditionalists claim knowledge of the "original" and "pure" teachings from the Pali texts and declare reinterpretations invalid.  In Thailand there is tension and difference between the institutional Sangha Council which centralizes and regulates practices according to political declarations and the localized, hybridized spirituality centered around village temples which borrows freely from animist and Indian non-Buddhist traditions.  Can anyone be a Buddhist without certification of some kind?

A good friend took me to task for my post yesterday, saying the "historical" Buddha was indeed a Buddhist and clearly intended, "from whatever reading of Buddhism you choose," to set up a religion.  He is a serious follower of Buddhism and I always take his criticisms seriously (unless they become personal).  But I believe here it is the voice of faith speaking (which I do not take lightly).  From my study of history, however, I am confident that the English words "religion" and "Buddhism" are of recent invention, perhaps no more than two hundreds years ago, and were classifications created by western academics, sometimes to marginalize Asian spirituality.  We need other descriptions for cultural activities prior to the establishment of institutions, and hundreds of years before there is any historical evidence.  I question whether the Buddha's community of followers, the sangha, counts as a religion in the modern sense.  And I think it's anachronistic to call their leader a "Buddhist."  And finally, while I believe there was probably a real spiritual teacher, Siddhattha Gotama, on the subcontinent in the 5th century BCE, whose teachings were singularly impressive to his followers, I'm not sure the words and stories ascribed to him are true in the factual sense.  I think the search for a "pure," "original" and "universal" Buddhist teaching is fruitless.

Does this get me kicked out of the Buddhist tent?

This is Not a Buddhist

We celebrated our first wedding anniversary this week by dressing up and traveling an hour by taxi through heavy Bangkok traffic to dine in the Parkview Restaurant at the Imperial Queen's Park Hotel.  The incredibly expensive buffet included passable wine and lots of food we don't normally eat, including foie gras.  Nan wanted to try it.  Later I posted a photo of Nan and her pad of paté on Facebook and received this impassioned response:

As a Buddhist, I think you have a ethical responsibility not to support such horrible cruelty in the name of cuisine ... at least when it's so easy for you to help. Otherwise, I must say, it's armchair Buddhism ...

Now I know how foie gras is made because I saw "Mondo Cane" back in the 1960s, and I classify it with soups made from shark fin and bird's nest.  But it was Nan's experience and I always encourage her to explore the world that most village girls never see.  She had two servings. I took a bite and found it bland. I enjoyed the selection of cheeses with French bread.  The barbecued salmon, Australian beef and lamb chops (a rarity in Thailand) were more tasty and the cornucopia of desserts (dipping watermelon in a chocolate fountain!) were to die for.  We had exchanged gifts before leaving: a shirt for me and a new watch for Nan.  I wore a tie (the only other person with one in the restaurant was the maître d'hôtel) and Nan a slinky dress inherited from her aunt.  We gorged until we were full and I had finished the last spoonful of kiwi sorbet.

What gave me pause in the plea from my Facebook friend was not guilt over contributing to the suffering of geese (all my consumption choices contain that risk), but the assumption that I was a Buddhist.  The headline for this post, for those who flunked art history, is a reference to the Magritte painting of a pipe containing the words, "Ceci c'est pas non une pipe."  He titled it "The Treachery of Images," and it serves to remind me that icons and symbols are not transparent but have a history.  Just as Jesus was not a Christian, the Buddha was not a Buddhist (and the images and representations of each figure are further removed from that label).  Am I a Buddhist?  I have never taken the refuge vows which most agree are necessary to assume that identity.  Last year the Pali scholar from Oxford, Richard Gombrich, told a conference audience here that he was "not a Buddhist, but I very much admire Buddhism and especially Buddhist ethics.  I am not a Buddhist in a technical sense."  I like that.  Does it mean then we're only "armchair Buddhists"?

The day before our anniversary, I accompanied students of English from my university on a field trip to Ayutthaya, the capital of the Thai kingdom from 1350 to 1767 when it was destroyed by Burmese invaders.  All that remained was a field of red brick and headless Buddha statues.  Some of the brick was used in building the new capital at Thonburi and then Rattanakosin in what is now Bangkok.  Much of the city an hour north of the present capital has now been painstakingly reconstructed for tourists and students of history, although not all of the 500 temples have been rebuilt in the city Europeans described as the Venice of Asia because of its canals (the center is an island at the confluence of three rivers, and is consequently often flooded).  Ayutthaya was a Buddhist monarchy with the identity of its people affirmed by each pillar, then as now.  For Thais, the dhamma is inseparably linked with rule by a devaraja (god-king), a concept from India by way of the Khmer empire in Cambodia.

My students have come to Bangkok, and now the new campus in Wangnoi outside Ayutthaya, from Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, south China, southern Vietnam,  and Shan State in Burma.  They have to be taught the unfamiliar English words "Buddhism" and "Buddhist."  In Thai, they follow sasanaput, the teachings of the Lord Buddha.  "Religion" is an abstract concept, hard to grasp, although they learn to think of Buddhism as a religion equal to the Christianity brought here by missionaries over the last 500 years (converts in Thailand are slim pickings). My students on the field trip clambered over the ruins and took photos of each other.  June, our Thai tour guide, gave a history lesson in English on the bus but the monks chatted with each other, listened to music on earphones, or slept.  I couldn't hear much over the rumble of traffic and squeaking of the bus carriage.  History taught in Thailand is celebratory rather than objective.  There is a big flap in the news here at the moment over students at a middle school in Chiang Mai who dressed up for an activity day as Nazis, apparently unaware of the history of National Socialism in Germany and its tragic consequences.

Since "Buddhism" and "religion" have become reified and commodified through use, it's difficult to talk about the living practices, beliefs and customs on view everywhere in Thailand and other Asian countries without recourse to these labels and the discourse that surrounds them.  I'm attempting to put together a conference paper on the differences I've observed between "buddhisms" (traditional vs. modern, Asian vs. Western, for starters) and whether or not it's possible to unify them all within one "big tent."  I got this idea from reading somewhere that it was more accurate to speak of "christianities" than an abstract Christianity which doe not in fact exist.  I started by reading the voluminous literature on American Buddhism; one writer called it "Ameriyana" to contrast it with "Theravada" and "Mahayana," the two generally accepted schools of Asian Buddhism.  Westerners reject ritual and monasticism to focus on meditation and what Thich Nhat Hahn calls "inter-being," an interconnectedness with people and nature.  This makes understandable a much-told joke about the Dalai Lama asking a hot dog vendor to "make me one with everything."  But when the Tibetan leader was told the joke, he found it incomprehensible.  The dhamma generally teaches elimination of self rather than an expansion of the self.  But in the west the romantic notion of mystical oneness prevails.

Buddhism in Thailand is a hybrid cultural practice combining Brahmanism and various forms of Buddhism, brought to Southeast Asia by merchants along sea routes from India, with local animist beliefs and rituals.  There is little enforced orthodoxy, although Buddhist teaching relies on the Pali Tripitaka, considered to contain the earliest sayings of the Buddha (although not written down for hundreds of years after his death).  Like "Hinduism," an institutional structure based on the traditions of brahmin priests, Asian Buddhism absorbs everything in its path. The bewildering variety of icons and symbols I found in Thailand were nothing like the rather austere zen and vipassana Buddhism I knew in California.  How could these buddhisms coexist in the same tent?

For the first 2,000 years of its history, teachings and practices centering on the perhaps mythical figure of the Buddha spread out of India south to Sri Lanka, east to Southeast Asia, and north to Tibet, China, Japan and Korea.  There was little contact and interchange between different sects and schools which intermingled with local cultures to create different blends.  European visitors lumped all their observations into the category of "heathen" and compared it unfavorably with the three monotheistic "world" religions.  But in the 19th century, linguists working as colonial administrators discovered and translated sacred texts of the Far East, thereby creating "Buddhism."  At first the texts were seen as evidence of  "pure" Buddhism while living practices were viewed as corruptions of the original religion.  Then two Theosophists from the U.S. went to Sri Lanka, became Buddhists and reconstructed the religion, making it more "protestant" and anti-colonial in the process.  There is now a large corpus of literature on "Buddhist modernism," which, with the connivance of Asian teachers, made Buddhism more rational and scientific, countering an earlier European opinion that it fostered nihilism.  Homegrown modernists (and King Mongut in Thailand, when not fighting with Anna, did his part) tried to purge Buddhism of superstitious accretions and promoted an intellectual understanding of the dhamma over a devotional one.  A wide variety of buddhisms from different Asian countries presented teachings acceptable to American susceptibilities at the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893.  From the Transcendentalists to the beats and hippies, America welcomed Buddhism with open arms, first zen and more recently the vajrayana tradition from Tibet which has achieved a popularity all out of proportion to its size in the Buddhist universe.

At the annual Day of Vesak celebration and conference held by my university, several thousand Buddhists from all over the world representing most traditions gather for three days of talks and ceremonies.  The monks and nuns in their many-colored robes and the laypeople speaking a Babel of languages is most impressive.  The large hall at Wangnoi is certainly a big tent able to hold all views and opinions of the dhamma despite superficial differences.  One big difference, however, is the respect accorded the Thai monarchy.  Nowhere else is royalty so intertwined with religion.  One delegate describe it critically as "the thaification of Buddhism."  But at least religious imagery and devotional ceremonies were on display, unlike in the West where perhaps, in their zeal to purge Buddhism of Asian rituals and superstition, the baby might thrown out with the bathwater.

My paper on buddhisms in the big tent is far from finished.  I've accumulated a foot of printouts and my leaky memory already makes any coherent organization of research impossible.  I want to write about the dispute in the pages of Mandela between the secularist Stephen Batchelor and the traditionalist B. Alan Wallace, both trained in the Tibetan tradition, over what counts as authentic teaching and what can be doubted (perhaps karma and rebirth).  Then there are the punks and progressives, mostly younger Buddhists, who criticize the first generation of Buddhist converts in America with their wind chimes and hippie ways.  In Thailand, Buddhist reformer Buddhadasa tried to eliminate superstitions while affirming modernist ideas, though his student, Phra Visalo, believes some superstitions are helpful.  A new generation of Asian academics, like Prapod Assavavirulhakarn from Chulalongkorn University, are contesting accepted Buddhist history written mostly by Westerners and even claiming that "Theravada," the recognized term for southern Buddhism, is inaccurate and useless.

But I may not finish (I've already said as much in an earlier blog post).  The research is fascinating and illuminating and I've always liked it more than crafting an argument.  This post is a way to run through several of my ideas to see if they make sense in print.  I've even got some thoughts on methods to actually unify the disparate elements of a hijacked tradition.  Wittgenstein's theory of family resemblance might be useful, as is the concept of hybridity developed by anti-colonial theorists.  And Buddhist historian Robert H. Scharf has some interesting suggestions about conversation as the unifying element.  I love the title of Tomoko Masuzawa's 2005 book, The Invention Of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved In The Language Of Pluralism.  I've only read her chapter on Buddhism but her thesis is provocative and persuasive.  The struggle over what counts as Buddhism seems to be a very-unbuddhistic fight for control.  Why does "religion" have to be universal anyway?  The Thais I see who daily pay respects to the Buddha and to Ganesha and who practice generosity to gain a favorable rebirth have no need of being theologically correct.  Few have the luxury to pick and choose beliefs from the spiritual marketplace as do western spiritual searchers.  Their devotion is more simple and honest, and I prefer to stay in their big tent.

  

Not Working on Myself

The old man in the elevator shook my hand and asked my age.  When I told him, he said: "I'm 81."  As I walked Nan to the bus stop, our daily ritual, he said to her in Thai that he did yoga every morning.  As he strode off in front of us to buy the morning newspaper, his strong legs moved agelessly under the shorts.  Nan went to class this morning feeling sore from a half hour on the treadmill in the gym yesterday.  She was happily sweaty when I came home from teaching yesterday, proud to have exercised by herself in the small facility three floors below our apartment.  Any urge to do something for my body is missing in inaction.  I move slowly between couch and refrigerator, computer and toilet, noticing the stiffness in my bones.  Decades of a guilty conscience whisper incessantly in my ear but I ignore the advice.  I've retired from all self-help regimens.

Of course the alternative to not working on one's self is a slow death.  I give it maybe 85 years (the old man looked pretty spry).  That's enough for one lifetime.  My last wife was addicted to fitness, and I think it's a fine thing to want to improve yourself, body and/or mind.  I even tried African dance with her until I injured my neck and couldn't turn my head for weeks.  She lifted weights and I bought some not-so-heavy dumbbells to keep in my office.  But they gathered dust.  I did take up jogging in my 30's and bought a subscription to Runner's World.  I ran in some races and got up to 11 miles, thinking I might train for a marathon.  But when my favorite columnist died of a heart attack while running, and work forced me to run before or after dark, I gave it up and resumed smoking.  I was heedless in my youth.

My brother has been obsessed with his health.  He's up on all the latest diseases, conditions and treatments and is regularly checked for newly discovered ailments.  He's very knowledgeable about vitamins and popular supplements and when my mother was in her 90's he did his best to change her diet.  The food he bought sat unused in her refrigerator and on her shelves while she consumed sweet and fatty items that the natural foods press claimed would kill you.   We ate ice cream and cookies together on my visits, read the National Enquirer and watched trashy TV shows.  There was lots of advice in the supermarket tabloids on how to live a long, healthy and blameless life, but we ignored it.  She broke her hip in a fall, went into the hospital and never came home.

Reading books, joining gyms and listening to self-help gurus of every stripe is a preoccupation of the well-to-do.  People for whom living is a struggle, like the illegal Burmese in Bangkok who beg on the pedestrian bridges and work on construction gangs building the high-rise condos, have no time to improve themselves.  Psychotherapy and meditation (which seem to have blended together in the modern mind) are luxuries indulged in by people with money and time on their hands.  They've come to think that something is not quite right and they must act to correct the problem, whether physical or mental.  Behind the urge to change is a feeling of lack or incompleteness.

This is not to excuse myself.  I acknowledge a certain laziness when it comes to correcting my faults.  My father was a big man and he did not move in my memory very fast.  Outside of the swimming pool, he was slow and deliberate.  His favorite position was reclining in a big overstuffed chair in front of the TV set.  My brother, on the other hand, was short and shy.  At an early age he set about remaking his body and was quite successful.  He's taller now, more muscular, and he can even grow a better beard than I can, a source of some resentment on my part.  I was persuaded to climb the rope on the gym team in junior high school, but I enjoyed coming down more than going up, and my only reason for the effort was to earn a letterman's sweater I could let my girlfriend wear.

We all have our goals, and mine from an early age was to penetrate mysteries with my mind.  I was a voracious reader and it stood me in good stead, eventually, after some false starts, getting me into the university where I set about becoming an intellectual.  Now, at the other end of the search, I've read lots of books, and people even think I'm a smart and deep thinker (that's been said to me twice lately), a perception I don't particularly share.  For me it's easy to read and scatter my inquiries broadly, but it's difficult -- nay impossible -- to keep my body youthful and my spirit at peace.  After twenty years of meditation practice, on and off, after coming to Thailand four years ago I got up off the cushion and quit.

Is meditation just another form of self-help?  That would be a justification I'm not yet ready to make.  What I can tell you is that although I was able to sit for over an hour at times, I never experienced much peace and quiet.  I've tried Theosophy and Transcendental Meditation, and gone to India to an ashram -- four times!  Always the thoughts intruded, and focusing on my breath only served to make breathing laborious.  The fault, dear friends, of course must be mine.  Most of the famous meditation teachers today began after I first sat many years ago with an egg timer and Baba Ram Dass' little meditation book.  Unlike my hesitant and insufficient practice, however, they kept at it and achieved...what?  I've yet to meet what I could unequivocally believe was an enlightened being.  Many teachers and authors have the gift of gab.  Alan Watts was a master at speaking of the wisdom of the East.  But he died an alcoholic, forgetting or unable to follow his own advice.  So I failed at meditation.  I couldn't give up my thoughts, was unable to sit in the proper position, and during the lecture missed the crucial instructions needed to become an arahant.

As my mother would say, no use crying over spilt milk.  I'm pretty comfortable with the fact that I will not become enlightened in this lifetime.  I'll also never be able to sit in a full lotus position (now I require a chair rather than a cushion to sit at various lectures on Buddhism).  And of course I can't bench press 200 pounds, run in a marathon or play Bach on the piano (I did want to play sax in Stan Kenton's band, but never fulfilled that dream either).  Americans growing up are encouraged to excel at something, and I took the advice to heart.  But I never became an actor or musician, and my attempts to be a published writer came to nought, except in these pages.  I restarted my academic career too late to become a tenured professor.  But now, here in Thailand, I'm a teacher, an ajahn, and I experience the most profound satisfaction from interacting with my students who are eager to learn English and transcend their humble beginnings.  They tell me I help them and I see the gratitude in their eyes.

I've changed my mind about spiritual matters many times over the years and doubt that I'll ever really have a settled position on what we label "religion" (which indicates that I don't think much of that label these days, though I respect the cultural beliefs and behavior it often maligns).  But I do think this:  We don't need to work on ourselves.  What we need to do is love one another and take care of each other.  Everyone makes mistakes: acknowledge them, forgive them and move on.  If I were a self-help guru, I might say: Change is unnecessary.  What's past is done with.  The only moment that counts is now.  Of course we will fail, get distracted and hurt someone.  Humans do that; no one is perfect.  But I feel very hesitant about offering any advice.  We all have different paths, different contexts, different genes.  I can only blabber about what I do, and don't do.

Tom Pepper has written an excellent article on Buddhism and psychotherapy, prompting some of these thoughts, which you can read here.

The State of My Studies

I had an epiphany of sorts Monday morning while falling asleep during a conference lecture about the state of Buddhist studies that I had anticipated would be fascinating.  The problem was not the speaker's, who is a world authority on Pali and Sanskrit texts, but mine.  His talk and the beginning of the next, by a woman from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, bored me.  It seemed to be all about how many Buddhas can dance on the head of a pin, and I never cared for that kind of Christian theological nit picking when the subject was angels.  So I got up and left, less than two hours after the conference had begun.

"Know thyself," advised Socrates, and I've tried, lord I've tried.  But now in my seventh decade and running out of time, I am still a mystery to me.

One thing I've learned about myself is that I'm obsessive.  Once I get an idea in my head, I'm like a dog with a bone.  And earlier this year, after serving for the second time as secretary for an academic panel at an international Buddhist conference, I decided I wanted to be the bride and not the bridesmaid.  So I submitted a proposal for a paper on Buddhism to deliver at a conference in December and it was accepted.  I immediately dove into the research and collected a mountain of books and articles on the subject (metaphorically speaking, since almost everything is digital now).  It absorbed much of my free time.  Though I have a doctorate, I've had little experience giving papers, so I worried about it being good enough.  Increasingly I became distracted and temperamental.  Since I couldn't neglect my teaching, with classes now twice a week, the impact of my preoccupation and obsessiveness fell on my patient wife Nan.

Farang seem culturally predisposed to jai raan (a hot heart), the Thai term for impatience and upset.  This could be anything that upsets the delicate balance of the Thai social apple cart.  Advice offered to the worried and/or angry westerner is usually to cultivate jai yen (a cool heart) or, almost as often, to opine: "You think too much."  It's true, and I can often watch it happening through Nan's eyes, that volcano of emotion triggered in me by obsession, compulsiveness, frustration, concern and reaction.  I've written about this before, and I'm sure it's true for most of my expat friends, although many continue to blame the match rather than the fuel.

Loss of control is a convenient trigger.  The more time my obsessions require, the less wiggle room or down time I allow myself, and I get pissed at the noose I've tied.  The knot should be easy to undo if we've tied it ourself, but sometimes that doesn't work.  The trick is to see the connection.  This morning provided a great example:  I went down to buy a newspaper and forgot my key.  This is the first time that's happened in three years of living in this building.  Nan had just left for school.  I had money but no phone.  My first reaction, at the prospect of waiting eight hours for Nan to return, was shock.  But this loss of control didn't produce upset.  Shock was followed by laughter at the absurdity of the situation I'd created with my absent mind.  This was replaced by ingenuity:  I went to the office, communicated my problem, and a locksmith was quickly summoned who opened the door in a couple of minutes for about $13.50 (an outrageous fee here).

Last weekend, with yet another financial Sword of Damocles hanging over my head this month, Nan and I traveled to Pranburi on the coast south of Hua Hin in a car owned by her sister's boyfriend.  Surin speaks only a little English and his pronunciation is not easy to understand.  The original plan had been to go down Friday and spend two nights there since Nan and I needed to be home Sunday night.  But when Ann changed the days without telling us, and when I said one night was not enough, Nan felt caught in the middle and required some consoling.  So we stayed the one night and had to return to Bangkok by van.  The uncertainties and changes were a recipe for loss of control and I drifted in an out of jai raa, making both me and my wife unhappy.

Thais are much more accepting of disruptions in plans and the absence of control in a situation.  Loss of face (for example, by arguing passionately about something) is assiduously avoided.  I wanted Surin to know that it wasn't my fault that he had to pay for another night in the hotel room that we wouldn't use. At some point during the trip I told Nan that she was a person who lived by "faith" rather than reason, a low blow.  She, however, heard the word as "fake," and a little later told me with tears in her eyes that she was NOT a "fake person."  That required some unscrambling, and it also let me see how the carelessness of my words, particularly in this cross-cultural situation, can cause hurt.

So what does all this have to do with my epiphany during the boring conference lecture?  It was the realization that I have neither the time nor inclination to be the scholar at this late date in my career and play the game which my professor friend at the conference called "bullshit." Another scholar there said an expert in the field of Southeast Asian Buddhism had called a book I found stimulating "no good."  Such intellectual condemnation is commonplace in a profession where competition for right ideas can be cut-throat.  I remain curious about many things, not the least of them Thai Buddhism and its morphed twin in the west, but know now that I have neither the background nor the drive to explore a comparison in depth.  When I was 17 and recovering from a serious car accident, I sold my clarinet and alto sax after realizing that I would never become as good a musician as I wanted to be.  That goes for academia these days, although it's the accident of age that has prompted this reflection.  Now, with that mound of research material set aside, I might again find pleasure in reading novels, watching movies and snuggling with my wife.

We enjoyed our short trip to Pranburi.  The high point was eating, for Surin is very knowledgeable about the best restaurants where you can find the freshest fish and the tastiest cuisine.  We had an incredible lunch on Saturday in Cha-Am on the wharf beside the fishing fleet while a group of customers watched Muay Thai boxing on TV.  Dinner was at a place on the beach in Pranburi, a long strip beside the water dotted with luxury hotels, and a recommendation from Surin's friend got us a fabulous meal for four for under $30 with three additional dishes for free.  Again it was seafood, fresh from the water, and cooked to succulent perfection.  I wish I were a food writer who could adequately describe it (or even cook like that).  On the way down we visited the oversized statue of the famous monk Luang Por Tuad at Wat Huay Mongol, a place of pilgrimage where sacred amulets sell like hotcakes.  We stopped at a faux Fishing Village where no one fished and boated but lots of stuff was on sale, and in the evening we strolled through old town Pranburi where hundred-year-old shop houses are being restored for antique stores and coffee shops.  We swan in the pool of the Pattawia Resort and Spa, a large hotel catering to tour groups that has seen better days, and we spent a morning on the lovely beach at Khao Kalok where we  relaxed in the shade of a large cave-dotted cliff until the rains came.

Studying one's self and learning how to avoid suffering and hurting others requires a lifetime.  There doesn't seem to be a short cut.

And now for something completely different:  Lunch today.

Photo Porn and the Demise of a friend

My trusty Canon G11, companion on many adventures during the last year and a half, died this week.  I was photographing the English competition at my school (more below) and used the telephoto lens for a closeup shot of a speaker. When I turned the camera off, the lens refused to retract.  When I turned it back on, I got the message: "Lens error, restart camera."  But restarting didn't help.  With a little jiggling and pushing, I could force the lens back down, but clearly it was in trouble.  That night I learned from Google than a stuck lens was the most common problem for digital cameras and it was almost certainly fatal.  I tried all the possible fixes suggested at one web site but nothing worked.  Yesterday I took it to the Canon service center at MBK and was told that the lens must be replaced, at a cost of 8,900 baht.  Since the G11 originally cost 16,900 baht, all I could do was laugh.

Humor is the best medicine.  There was something poetic, and even pornographic, in the G11's ailment, stuck with an erected lens as if it had consumed too much photoviagra.  I was sure Hef would understand.  A friend once told me that his cure for erectile dysfunction was a needle with a prescribed chemical.  But he miscalculated and gave himself an overdose.  The subsequent trip to the hospital was painful and embarrassing for him.  The impolite Thai word for the male member is จู๋ which is pronounced "jew" (I hope my Hebrew friends appreciate this), and the word for erection is derived from the Thai for ice (hard water), น้ำแข็ง.  So my new name for the unfortunate situation with my G11 is จู๋แข็ง.  Nan wants it known that I learned this entirely without her help or approval.

This is one of the first photos taken with my new G11 on the King's birthday a year and a half ago (you can always see a larger version of my pictures by clicking on them).  It captured a clarity under low light natural conditions that none of my previous digital cameras could achieve.  Smaller than an SLR and bigger than a pocket point and click, the G11 was a bit bulky, but I took it everywhere. It featured an adjustable view finder that allowed for centered self portraits and shots from awkward angles. It wasn't easy to whip it out of my bag on the spur of the moment, a necessity for fast moving candids in this photographable city, but it satisfied my aesthetic needs  to make art out of my surroundings.   What do you do with a defunct camera?  I'm thinking of turning it into a planter, perhaps with an orchid coming up out of the lens casing.  I shall miss you, G11, but you'll be quickly replaced, probably today by a Canon S925 (less bulky, easy to whip out).

Speaking of photos, before I went back to California last year I attempted to clean out and rearrange my computer files and folders and managed to accidentally delete a photo storage file containing thousands of images from my world travels circa 2004-2007. The backlog of old photos had long needed purging but I didn't mean to throw out the babies with the bathwater.  Some of my artistic masterpieces were in that folder.  Fortunately I had saved a good selection from my trips at my Flickr site.  Last week I discovered a site called Flick and Share that makes it easy to transfer Flickr photos back to my computer.  This is a photo I took of St. Paul's Cathedral during a trip to London and Europe in 2005.

When people outside of Thailand think of food, they often conjure up visions of the archetypal Thai cuisine: satay, pad Thai, tom yum kung, spicy papaya salad and exotic deserts made with mango, rambutan and durian.  Yes, there's that.  Last night we ate at the noodle buffet in MBK that featured sauces of undetermined origin, fiery beyond belief, and a week ago Ann's boyfriend Surin took us to a tiny hole-in-the-wall shophouse restaurant in Rattanakosin, the old part of Bangkok, that cooked us a 4-star meal of various sea food.  Last week I showed Nan what wonders May Kaidee's restaurant in Banglamphu could perform with vegetables and tofu.  But old tastes die hard.  In the evening after teaching, I prefer to relax with a traditional American root beer float, and many mornings Nan cooks me a farang breakfast of scrambled eggs with cheese, crispy bacon, and toast with blueberry jelly.  And we both like Swenson's, the chain founded in San Francisco with outlets everywhere in Bangkok.  The cheeseburgers at Sizzler's (Nan likes the salad bar), which are equally available throughout the city and very popular, almost remind me of my former homeland.

The big event this week was an English "Quiz Contest" held at my university and organized by the English Club, most of whom are my students.  Two teams of three competed in each round with the first to get five correct answers advancing to the next round.  Several of us teachers were tasked with devising 500 questions in four categories: Buddhism, Economics, Politics and Thailand.  I was asked to read them (we went through them all and had to repeat the unanswered ones).  Students came from schools all over the area, and the audience was filled with monks and guests from Ayutthaya and vicinity where Mahachula is located.  I was on my feet for five hours until the final question -- "What is the name of Vietnam's currency?" -- was answered by the winning team with a shout:  "the dong!"  I loved it, and a good time was had by all.  You can see a clip of it on YouTube.

After more than a year of landscaping, Sanam Luang, Bangkok's large park and parade ground near the Grand Palace is open for pleasure seekers (although the prostitutes and sidewalk vendors have been kept away by the large police presence).  Many are unhappy about the new fence and restricted hours, but during both afternoon and evening visits last week Nan and I found the grounds to be quiet, peaceful and, overall, lovely.  The golden spires of the palace, beneath which Anna taught the children of the king, never fail to inspire awe.  We enjoyed watching the kites.  Soon, half the park will be taken over by elaborate funeral preparations for the King's cousin, only daughter of King Rama VI, similar to that two year's ago for the King's sister.

My intellectual and social life continues to be busy.  Recently our IDEA group discussed "hybridity" as a fruitful concept for problematic issues of identity, among other ideas, from a challenging book, The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand.  On a couple of Thursdays I've met at a cafe in Siam Paragon with Ray from California and a few of his expat friends where they ogle the Hi-So girls and pontificate about the world.  Graham from Australia, who teaches English at an international school, told me that some teachers can make as much as 100,000 baht a month which is more than twice what I expected.  But I'm not ready to give up my monks and retirement for filthy lucre.  And I attended a stimulating talk by Tibetan nun Ani Zamba, visiting from her center in Brazil, who said the self is created in the process of perceiving things as if they exist independently of our perception: "Frozen entities, frozen self."  The cost of this illusion, she said, is high. Next week I'm going to a lecture across the street from Sanam Luang at the National Museum given by American scholar Justin McDaniel on "The Making of a Saint -- Somdet To in the History of Thai Buddhism."  And I'll also hear him speak at a conference on Buddhism at the S.D. Hotel almost next door to my condo, organized by Mahidol University.  It will be a busy week.  The BuddhistPsychos also meet to complete their discussion (some would say savaging) of "The Little Prince."  This weekend Ann and Surin are taking us for a short trip to Pranburi on the coast south of Hua Hin.  The Paradise boogie continues!

And next Wednesday, my daughter (whom I just learned is traveling in Spain), will turn 34 years old.  Happy birthday, Molly!

A Toss of the Dice

They're rioting in Africa 

There's strife in Iran 

What nature doesn't do to us 

Will be done by our fellow man 

"The Merry Minuet," sung by the Kingston Trio 

When all else fails, buy a lottery ticket.  We bought two from this seller outside Wat Rakhang where Nan and I went to offer gifts in a plastic bucket (the standard stuff, tooth paste, etc.) and receive a watery blessing on my 72nd birthday.  I got a ticket with a six-digit number ending in "72."  Just to be on the safe side, Nan's ticket ended in "27."  They cost 100 baht each, 80 for the lottery and 20 for the ticket seller.  Most of the vendors are aged, infirm or disabled, and you're never more than a stone's throw from one in Bangkok.  There's also an illegal underground lottery where you can bet as little as a baht.  Nan once sold tickets but quit when it felt too dangerous. The underground lottery is popular in the villages where legitimate ticket sellers are rare.  When Jerry bought his wife a truck recently, most of their relatives put money on the numbers in the new license number.  His wife once won 8,000 baht in the national lottery and I would have been happy with anything as a sign of the universe's favor.

But we didn't win.  It's not my life that needs a boost, however, but the planet earth.  London is burning, the global stock market is tanking, a Christian fascist went wacko in Norway, and earthquakes and storms are giving evidence of serious tampering with the planet's weather systems by industrial civilization.  What's not to worry about?  But the only untoward event in my life lately was forgetting my card card in the ATM machine which required having a new one shipped from the states (it's the only lifeline to my income which is fast losing value along with the deflating dollar).

It's so hard trying to find a reason for everything.  I was trained like most westerners to trace effects back to their causes.  So I scour the print and electronic media to uncover reasons for the rise of the powerful lunatic fringe in America, the deadly persistance of the U.S. war machine in the Middle East, and the puzzle of Obama's lack of passion (and a backbone).  Sometimes it just feels like I'm spinning my wheels, and that all my posts, comments, likes, tweets and links are so much dust.  Thais take a different approach to confusion and catastrophe (or just the nuttiness of life).  Nan awoke the other morning and announced she wanted to tamboon (make merit) with a monk she remembered from several years ago.  I followed along on a short bus ride, and there he was, at his station by the 7-11, accepting gifts of food (we bought some from a nearby cart) and prayers from passers by.  My knees don't allow me to kneel like Nan so a folded my palms and bowed my head while the kindly old monk chanted a Pali blessing for us.  And you know, I felt better, intellectually cleansed (for a brief moment), by the experience.

Afterward, we went for a walk in the streets behind the major thoroughfare where Nan lived when she first came to Bangkok and found a different world, almost a village within the city, where only a little traffic flowed, small shops served the community and the jungle threatened to overwhelm areas of neglect, like this lot where an old campaign poster remains for the woman who has just become Thailand's first female prime minister.  It was a beautiful morning, the air was clear and not yet hot, and strolling through the quieted streets, visiting a temple on the way and sitting in a park by a canal, gave the mind pause from its incessant need to understand and explain.

I have been absent from these pages for three weeks not because there was nothing to report but because my life of retirement now seems excessively busy.  Much of the activity revolves around my school and teaching.  I gave my two dozen students a midterm exam and followed it with a day of interviews, talking with each monk (and one laywoman) about their results, homework and progress in the class.  They've asked me to prepare questions for a big contest in two weeks with 600 students from other universities (I picture a "Slumdog Millionaire" event)  and for me to be the MC.  I've begun teaching the second half of a course on mass media for graduate students in linguistics and prepared a spiffy PowerPoint presentation with film clips from YouTube.  But it was overkill for the six students at my first lecture who are struggling with basic English.  Next week I'll try something simpler.  And I'm deep into research for a conference paper comparing Buddhist modernism in the west, with its focus on meditation and absence of ritual, with a popular religiosity in Thailand that seamlessly blends Brahmanism and animism with a royalist-influenced Theravada Buddhism.  Every day I discover new insights.

I'll have to finish writing before the October deadline because Nan and I are flying to Chiang Rai after the school term finishes for a visit  with her family in the nearby province of Phayao.  It will be my first trip to the village and I'm frankly nervous.  We'll stay in her Aunt Ban Yen's house which will be ours whenever we decide to move there permanently.  Nan must graduate with a degree and perhaps work for a couple of years before that happens, and I need to maintain my health and ability to maneuver around and enjoy the city.  Still, Nan has been eye-shopping for a flat-screen TV since the house has none, and a credenza for it to sit on.  There are lots of horror stories about farang and their encounter with village life, and I struggle to keep my expectations unblemished.  I've met her mom, brother and cousin, but not her step-father, and they're lovely people.  As big city relatives, however, we'll be expected to help out, and my lack of understanding for the enormous affection and gratitude Thai children feel toward their parents sometimes confuses and saddens Nan.

Our social calendar has been full.  We said good-bye to our good friend Janet during a lunch by the Chao Phraya River at one of our favorite spots.  Janet penned the lovely poem to her adopted city, Tone Deaf in Bangkok, and writes a provocative blog with the same name.  But she's ended her second (or third?) tour of duty here and has just returned to her American home, Seattle, where her sons live and where she spent many years as a bookseller at Elliott Bay.  She'll continue to work for ThingsAsian Press and hopes to return to Bangkok for annual visits.  We'll miss her.  On a recent Sunday, Nan and I joined Ian and Paradee at Rot Fai Park for lunch and a possible bike ride.  The entrance to the park, on land owned by the railway union is close to the Buddhadassa Indapanno Archives which I recently visited for the first time, and I took them all on a tour.  There was karaoke singing on the ground floor (I resisted but Ian was willing, though never called) and an art show upstairs near the lovely mediation hall.

One evening we joined a group of Thais and foreigners at a dinner hosted by Sean, editor of Ratchaprasong News and international press officer for the red shirts during the protests last year in Bangkok.  Speaking to us were two members of the Pheu Thai party which recently won the national election, Dr. Prasaeng and Khun Samarn.  While they assured us that the reds, who strongly contributed to the landslide victory, and the new prime minister's government would be closely allied, many of the questions asked them centered around the possibility of unsavory political compromises and the probable response of their supporters.  Yingluck's cabinet, unveiled this week, contains no one closely tied to the red shirts, and it's believed that her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, now in exile, influenced the choices so that the elite would permit them to govern.  It remains to be seen whether there will be unrest in provincial red villages.

This week the British monk Pandit Bhikku began his fifth series of Rains Retreat dhamma talks at a dance gallery off Sukhumvit.  I arrived in Thailand precisely four years ago and I quickly set about locating a source of information in English about Thai Buddhism.  A mae chee at Mahachula University directed me to the Little Bang Sangha which had recently formed and I attended the lectures Pandit gave that year at the Baan Aree Library.  There I met many of the friends I still know in Bangkok (sadly, Holly has gone) and at the first talk this week on "The Dance of Emptiness" I saw many familiar faces.  It was Pandit who encouraged me to teach English to monks and brought me to Wat Srisudaram where I spoke to the English Club and was offered a job in 2008.

And now for something completely different.  Last year Rubby, one of my Little Bang friends, suggested I register with a modeling agency that is always looking for non-Thais to hire for commercials or movies.  A number of people I know have been extras, and a couple appeared in "Hangover 2."  Nothing happened for me until last month when I was called to appear in a session to get stock photos of elders doing yoga and exercise.  The photographer was Rob Churchill who does wonderful non-commercial stuff, and I have no idea how this session will turn out.  Photos will be offered world-wide to anyone looking for old geezers working up a sweat (it was hard work!).  The session in an empty penthouse in Silom with incredible views of the city took only three hours and I was paid about $100.  I came home to tell Nan that I might become famous.  It was a lucky toss of the dice.

My friend Jerry has complained that there is entirely too little about sex in my blog, and he offered some biographical tidbits to spice up these pages.  But I think I'll wait until he and everyone we know is  dead and gone before revealing the shocking and salacious details he provided.  I'll write it up and stick it in a bank deposit box with instructions for publishing after the smoke has cleared.  Better yet, he should write about it himself and I'll review it here.