Feb 6 2014

Democracy, the Least Worst Way to Govern

By: Guest Author – in response to Protecting the Minority of the Opulent Against the Majority

I’ve always liked that quote of Winston Churchill’s. I think his imperialist/monarchist/aristocratic self warred with his democratic side.

My conclusions about searching for the ideal forms of economic, social and government systems are based on recognizing the basic or crude nature of humans: self-interested above all, greedy, aggressive, power-seeking tempered somewhat, but not always, by familial or tribal affiliation (maybe even love). This leads me to believe that some form of capitalism will always win out over socialism.

Humans will amass money and privileges and power for themselves regardless of the form of government. The highest members of the communist party always had better jobs, housing and status then the comrades. Revolutionaries who lead revolts to bring dramatic change to “the people” often end up as dictators. Robert Mugabe is just one example, or the return of military rule to Egypt.

There will always be some form of class system as people like to be better off than their neighbors and be highly regarded for it. A reason why utopias, and pure communism, if there ever was such an animal, fail. Hybrids, like the various social democracies in Europe can succeed but are always being assaulted by the usual forces from the left and right.

The clever, innovative, ruthless will exploit others, like the workers, whenever they can get away with it. Those at the top want to stay there and will do everything in their considerable power to stay there. I think you’re right on about representative government being the only way that the unfettered opulent minority (including the utterly reprehensible Tom Perkins), can be controlled. They don’t need protection at all. They need laws and regulation to moderate what otherwise would be unchecked greed in keeping with human nature.

One hundred plus years ago, in the U.S. the opulent minority such as Ford, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, amassed huge fortunes doing whatever they pleased. Moderates and progressives passed a bunch of laws, including the income tax, and regulations on interstate commerce, food safety, antitrust to remove some power from these robber barons and restore a small part of equity to the economy. Later we brought in labor unions, New Deal social programs and even the Great Society. All pushed and protected by government.

Today the pendulum has swung in favor of the opulent. We need to get it to reverse its course and come back toward the majority.

Most of the rest of the world thinks that democracy with representatives of the citizens having voice and command is the best system. But built in are battles between various majorities and minorities because personal interests will always conflict.

I think we could make our current systems work better if we could return to compromise being considered the honorable way to rule and, secondly, get as much money as possible out politics. This means finding people far different from the type of Democratic and Republican leaders we have now.

Feb 3 2014

Protecting the Opulent Against the Majority

A few days ago, billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins wrote that the way progressives are starting to treat the super rich reminds him of how the Nazis treated the Jews. Soon after his letter was published in multi-billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, he had to apologize for his politically incorrect phrasing. He would have done better to quote James Madison, “Father of the Constitution” and author of the Bill of Rights.

When the Federal Convention of 1787 turned to the question “whether the republican form shall be the basis of our government,” Madison pointed out: “In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place.”

The implication, he continued, is: “If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” (emphasis added)

A widely held belief has developed that the US Constitution offers protection for all minorities. That was not its intent. Madison’s much more limited aim was to protect the wealthy minority. Whether or not we like the result, we should recognize that our Constitution is working as intended.

How does it work? A republic is where power is held by elected representatives whose actions are bound by a Constitution. People in a republic vote for candidates who promise changes they like. The risk is that a small majority could make changes with unacceptable negative impact on the rest of the population. That’s why a Constitution is necessary, to prevent such changes by defining ‘unacceptable.’

I’m thinking about this because I’m reading Noam Chomsky. His diagnosis of why our government acts as it does, regardless which party is in power, feels spot on. He shows example after example of actions by our government that benefit the opulent minority and work against the interests of the majority here and throughout the world.

But Chomsky’s proposed solution is misguided. His central beliefs are that power corrupts and capitalism concentrates wealth, which, based on long first-hand experience and close study of history, are truths I hold to be self-evident. The question is, would his solution, anarcho-syndicalism, be better? Could it even work?

Anarcho-syndicalists are socialist libertarians. Like capitalist libertarians who enjoy President Reagan’s signature joke: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help'” they oppose central power. The difference is anarcho-syndicalists say the inevitable concentration of wealth by capitalism exploits the majority.

Attractive increases in freedom are promised by both kinds of libertarians. In real life, however, the system does not scale. A libertarian (i.e., unregulated) society cannot protect shared resources or universal needs: local societies often manage local resources (e.g., forests) sustainably but resources managed by non-locals are polluted and/or depleted. And small societies cannot retain freedom: they cannot defend themselves against more powerful exploiters.

It is true that a fundamental problem for large scale enterprises is that central planning cannot work: there’s too much change to comprehend at the center. An ingenious programmer I once hired was directed to model how many tractors Soviet factories should plan to build. He tried combinations of many, many factors without success before at last seeing how to produce results that pleased the planners. How? By plugging the number of tractors that were going to be built, anyway.

Big businesses fail for the same reason – they lose contact with changes in their market.

Another problem is many things that start small seem destined to grow big but central planners too often fail to identify which are worth the investment. Small societies with property managed at the local level would make better choices but they lack the necessary resources. Today’s semiconductor and internet infrastructure, medical technology and etc required enormous investment.

So history tells us that democracies with a constitution tend to be better for people than autocracies, that market-based economies tend to deliver better results than centrally planned ones, and that capitalism seems essential to generate disruptive technology and deploy it on a large scale.

Speaking in Parliament in 1947, not so long after he lost the election following WW2, Winston Churchill famously said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” The same looks to be true of capitalism in the economic sphere and nation states in the sphere of sovereign entities. They do all tend to concentrate power and wealth but the alternatives are worse.

So, “if these observations be just,” how can the non-opulent minorities who make up the majority get protection? Curtailing the inevitable abuses of power is achieved by incremental legislative changes that adapt Constitutional definitions to changes in society.

Because the fundamental structure of the system results in the wealth and power of the opulent minority always nudging the law’s evolution in their favor, other minorities must speak more loudly.

It is healthy that voices are now speaking loudly enough about too-high and rising inequality to be heard by Perkins and others. It indicates that our system is working as it should.

Jan 28 2014

The Practice of Transformation

First, some background to the epiphany (an experience of sudden and striking realization). Twenty-odd years ago I joined Dun and Bradstreet’s advanced services division as Director of Program Management. I was not the only one unfamiliar with what that job might be. When my business cards came, they identified me as Director of Program Manglement.

There is no better way in such a situation than Steve Jobs’ approach: “When you don’t know where to start, start somewhere.” I did what needed doing for a complex new service that was being developed in New York and tested and rolled out in country-specific variants all across Europe, then used that experience to establish a methodical software development process.

The first step in the process is a Vision Statement. Its purpose is to imagine and articulate “how great it will be when.” Because our mission was to develop and deploy “advanced services”, we had to imagine new ways our customers could do their work to get better results.

Vision Statements imagined people using radically new software to do business in new ways with far more effective results. We illustrated how pieces of the software might look and got feedback from innovative customers to identify the best ideas.

Then came the Scope Statement. That’s where, based on our image of “how great it will be when,” we defined what the first software version would and would not do. Scope transformed an ultimate vision into something we could actually do. That became the basis for the Project Plan.

So, the Vision Statement harnesses intuition: the Scope Statement employs the intellect. The Vision Statement is expansive: the Scope Statement is restrictive — that’s where you discipline yourself to say, “No, we don’t have to do that piece yet.”

By the time I took over as General Manager of that division then went on to establish D&B’s global “Technology Strategy, Architecture and Frameworks” I’d realized the same method of harnessing intuition disciplined by intellect was applicable to transformational business strategy.

No transformation is possible if you have no vision of “how great it will be.” At best you will find only quicker, cheaper ways of doing the same things you always did.

Now the epiphany: a couple of days ago, I realized Tibetan Buddhism is built on the same foundation.

In a long traditional set of rituals I practice every morning, supplemented by study and reflection later in the day, I imagine becoming deities that flawlessly manifest behavior I want to perfect. The only difference from business Visions is instead of imagining freedom from business limitations, I imagine freedom from emotional and conceptual habits.

In the same way as Vision Statements include illustrative stories, Tibetan Buddhist texts include tales about exemplary beings.

But unlike the process for product and business transformation, Tibetan Buddhism requires no Scope Statement. New products and services or business strategies take substantial time and investment which makes rigorous scope management of a stepwise transition essential.

Tibetan Buddhist practice is more like bug-fixing. All features exist, they’re just buggy. Because they’re so buggy, it’s hard to imagine all the defects gone, so we visualize deities that reveal in purified form what we cannot see even though it is already there.

How to proceed when there are so many bugs? The proven method in the business world is “continuous improvement.” One of its early leaders, W. Edwards Deming, was instrumental in Japan’s mastery of manufacturing. They summarize his teaching that errors are opportunities for learning to generate improvements as “every defect a treasure”.

Continuous improvement is an unremitting process of noticing defects, rigorously identifying their root causes, and incrementally eliminating those factors.

Tibetan Buddhism is a continuous improvement practice. My teacher says two to four hours of formal practice every day is necessary for transformation. Some change seems to be taking place since I upped my own practice to two hours. But it’s the same as in business, my aim must be to stay alert throughout the day, notice every defect, identify why it happened, and steadfastly uproot its cause.

I was lucky in my business life to get transformative teachings at Harvard Business School and elsewhere. I am lucky now to get transformative Tibetan Buddhist teachings. And I’m blessed above all by my parents’ teaching, “I don’t know, let’s work to find out.”

Epiphanies result, if at all, from long hard work whose aim may not even seem to be discovery. They are surprising because arriving at the realization is unexpected. The realization itself, however, is immediately recognized to be obvious truth.

It’s not surprising that both transformational Tibetan Buddhism and transformational business strategy use envisioning integrated with continuous improvement. My surprised feeling was because I hadn’t noticed that before. It’s lucky that what I learned in business was such good preparation for what I’m doing now.

Nov 20 2013

First Be A Good Person

One of my great heroes, Sachin Tendulkar, just retired at age 40. He was a spectacularly talented basman who first played international cricket for India when he was 16. I won`t cite his statistics because they will be meaningless if you don`t know cricket. Truly, they do have little meaning relative to the extraordinary adulation from the entire stadium at the close of his last match.

Now I`m watching Sachin respond to questions from adoring schoolchildren. His answers are always thoughtful, often humorous, most of all helpful. He`s thinking why each question was asked, how he can answer in a way the child can feel. They are spellbound.

The host asks the last question: “You have accomplished so much, Sachin, you are so famous, but you are so humble. How have you kept such humility?”

“When I was selected to play for my country for the first time, my father told me: Sachin, you have been honored today, you must do the best you can with your bat, but this is temporary. If you do well, people will like you, but there will be a time after cricket. You should want people still to like you after cricket. That means, first you must be a good person, then you can be a good cricketer.”

Sachin ended this way: “Some of you might play cricket for India, some of you might be lawyers or work in business or many other things. Whatever you do, please first be a good person.”

Oct 12 2013

Fundamentalists in the Mirror

Our media shows Muslim fundamentalists terrorizing the Middle East, shooting an Afghani schoolgirl, offering safety in Pakistan to those sworn to destroy us – a world we cannot understand whose people we have no choice but to fear.

What impression do they have of us?

An ongoing study, “The Republican Party Project”, offers a mirror where we can glimpse what they see. It is timely since our government is now shut down by the Republican Party. Muslims have seen us attack them with rhetoric, sanctions, drones, and armed forces. Now they see us at war with each other. They must have a theory about why we do these things.

Republican Party demographics suggest their idea may parallel ours about them.

The Project`s research finds the Party comprises 47% evangelical and religiously observant (30% evangelical), 22% libertarian-leaning Tea Party supporters and 25% moderates. The Christian half sees an America being destroyed by cultural rot from the outside. The libertarian quarter sees an America being destroyed by accelerating dependency on ever bigger government. Both groups are in a desperate fight to restore a deeply valued culture. The moderate quarter feels, and is unrepresented.

We see fundamentalist Muslims suppressing moderates “over there”. What the mirror shows is fundamentalist Christians and libertarians suppressing moderates “over here”.

We can imagine a response like this: “If American fundamentalists will risk plunging their economy into unfathomably deep depression, if they care so little for their people’s future, can there be any limit to the suffering they would wreak on us?” It`s a logical question.

Our media offers a worldview of Muslims “over there” who are our enemies unto death. It is logical to assume the media “over there” offers a worldview of Christians and other fanatics “over here” who are their enemies unto death. They will not have forgotten the “Crusade” President Bush said 9/11 compelled us to undertake, his “War on Terror” that would not end while a single terrorist remained alive.

The infection carried by these fantasies about those “over here” or “over there” whose symptoms are fear and hatred is highly contagious. We must reverse our rising fear and hatred of each other. We can counter the actions motivated by fear, hatred and greed without succumbing to the same infection.

Sep 8 2013

Chemical Weapons and the Law

Syria is subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which makes the recent use of chemical weapons there a crime. UN Weapons investigators analyzing evidence collected in Syria need about another week to establish if the weapons were used by Syrian government forces, if Syria’s leader authorized their use or was informed later, if they were instead used by rebel forces, or if more evidence is required to make a judgment.

President Obama says Syria’s leader is responsible for the crime and proposes unilateral retaliatory military action. Congress is debating whether to authorize that. Its vote is scheduled for two days hence, before the UN team completes its analysis. President Obama says he has the authority to take military action even if Congress votes no.

Unfortunately, US governments always have placed their faith exclusively in military power and refused to accept the rule of international law. President Bush’s UN representative formally excluded the USA from ICC jurisdiction. President Obama, despite his law degree and Nobel Peace Prize, is acting the same way.

Banning chemical weapons has been a long and tortuous challenge. The first attempt was the 1925 Geneva Protocol following the use of poison gas in WW1. Another attempt was initiated following the WW2 Holocaust but was stymied by the Cold War. In 1962 the US and USSR proposed elimination of all such weapons to the UN but between then and 1971 the US sprayed nearly 20 million gallons of chemical weapons in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia which resulted, according to the Vietnam Red Cross, in as many as 400,000 people killed or maimed, and half a million children with birth defects.

We knew Iraqi troops were routinely using chemical weapons against Iran in the early 1980s, and supplied them with a couple of batches each of anthrax and botulism bacteria in 1986. The Senate unanimously passed the Prevention of Genocide Act in 1988, which would have banned any military assistance to Iraq and import of Iraqi oil, but it did not pass in the House. We continued to supply Iraq with equipment we knew was for use in their chemical and nuclear weapons programs until Saddam Hussein misjudged our friendliness and invaded Kuwait.

In 1993, the UN called for destruction of all existing chemical weapons, no more manufacture, and an inspection body. Congress reluctantly ratified that statute in 1997 but then passed legislation so we could refuse inspections.

At last, the genocide in Yugoslavia and Rwanda sparked the UN in 1998 to initiate creation of an International Criminal Court, an enforcement mechanism. The court’s independence and jurisdiction were major issues. Could it be prevented from launching a prosecution by a veto from the US, Russia, China, the UK or France? Would it require approval to prosecute from the country where a crime was committed? Could it prosecute if there was already a court proceeding in that nation? Could it prosecute crimes committed in civil wars? Could it prosecute crimes committed before it was established?

We said we supported the ICC. In fact, we worked hard to emasculate it. We demanded that no US citizen could be indicted without our approval. We required veto power over any indictment. We insisted that the ICC could prosecute crimes only in nations that are a party to the ICC Convention. We said the ICC could have jurisdiction only if national courts failed to act. We demanded that national security and/or a superior’s orders must be accepted as grounds for defense.

Even though those severe constraints were reluctantly accepted, we voted against creation of the court. The vote was 120 in favor, 7 opposed and 21 abstentions. The court would become effective when ratified by the 60th nation. We worked hard to prevent that. In 2001, the Senate passed an act that would have prohibited us from cooperating with the ICC in any way, barred military aid to any country supporting the ICC and required us to use any means to release US citizens held by the court.

When in 2002 the 60th nation ratified the ICC and it came into force, we notified the UN that we refused to be a party to the treaty.

At this time 122 nations have ratified the ICC and 31 more, including Russia, have signed but not ratified the Statute, 3 of which, Israel, Sudan and the US, have withdrawn their signatures. 41 other UN member nations have not signed the Statute, including China and India.

Governments of nations that have refused ICC jurisdiction tend to be engaged in activities the ICC might well prosecute, e.g., Israel’s settlements, India and Pakistan’s activities in Kashmir, China’s in Tibet and Xinjiang, ours in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and etc.

The ICC has so far opened investigations only into 8 situations in Africa. It has indicted 30 people, issued arrest warrants for 21 and has 5 in custody. The atrocities being committed in Syria should be prosecuted by the ICC and we should be insisting that it do so. We should consider other options only if the ICC is barred, e.g., by a veto from Russia, from that investigation.

We should stop telling the world we are its judge and executioner and start supporting the international rule of law.

Aug 11 2013

Economic Consequences of Inequality

More than nine in ten Americans want the top 20% to have about one third (32%) of society’s wealth not 84% as they do now. Is that a good thing to want? Would a more equal distribution be bad for growth? Is the current distribution a problem, anyway?

The instinct of those who think the middle 60% should have close to 60% of society’s wealth is good. When the middle class has only a quarter of that share and it is shrinking, they cannot drive enough consumption of basic goods. That’s a big problem because 70% of our GDP is consumer spending.

Unequal wealth distribution results from unequal income income distribution. The opportunity to become more wealthy is important for economic growth. Is there an income distribution that maximizes growth? Is there a point where the wealthy have too much? I have found no definitive answer, but there has been a high correlation between extreme inequality and economic crises.

Is that correlation just happenstance? Probably not. Our economy was strong in the 1950s and 60s when everyone shared in income growth. It collapsed in the 1920s and 2000s when an extreme share of income growth went to the top 1% and a tiny percentage went to the bottom 90%.

The reason seems to be that when the middle-class falls behind to the extent it did in the 1920s and 2000s, governments promote easy credit. Both times, the middle class borrowed heavily as their earnings stagnated and the wealthy got more. In the 1920s, it was farm credit, installment loans and home mortgages – mortgage debt was almost three times higher in 1929 than in 1920. In the 2000s, it was home buyers putting no money down and investment banks lending $30 for each $1 they held.

When easy credit drives down the yield on traditional investments, investors become speculators. The wealthy piled into stocks in the 1920s driving the Dow from 64 in 1921 to 381 in 1929. In the 2000s the bubble was in seemingly safe but disastrous mortgage-backed securities.

The influential 1975 book, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, theorized that more equal distribution of incomes reduces the incentive to work and administrative costs waste some of what is taken from the rich for redistribution. Contemporary research summarized in this 2011 International Monetary Fund paper, Equality and Efficiency, suggests the opposite – equality is an important ingredient in promoting growth, and inequality in less sustained growth.

Income distribution is strongly associated with the duration of growth spells along with well-established growth factors such as quality of political institutions and trade openness. The chart below, which covers 1950 to 2006, shows the increase in expected duration of a growth spell for a given increase in several factors, keeping the others constant. Some inequality is necessary in a market economy but too much results in financial crisis.

Very few people saw what had gone wrong with the economy in the 1930s. One who did was not an economist but an extremely successful businessman. Marriner Eccles saw how his customers were reacting to the economic crisis and made recommendations to a Senate Finance Committee just before Roosevelt was sworn in as President in 1933. FDR’s actions that year were much like his predecessor Hoover’s and equally ineffective. Then he made Eccles Chairman of the Fed. He remained there until 1948 and later summarized his observations, quoted in The Great Recession.

Eccles wrote (paraphrased for simplicity): “mass production must be accompanied by mass consumption. That implies a distribution of income sufficient to provide buying power for the economy’s products. Instead, a giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 transferred purchasing power from mass consumers to investors. Investments were not made, however, because there was insufficient demand. Income was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Consumers could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.”

In other words, too much income going to the top chokes the life out of the economy. Now, for a variety of reasons, the same thing has happened again. How does it happen?

Extreme concentration of wealth starts slowly, builds unobtrusively, gains first influence then power and if unchecked, results in extreme corruption. As President Wilson wrote in 1913: “If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it”.

Boushey and Hersh’s comprehensive 2012 review of research into what makes an economy grow or stop growing, Income Inequality and the Strength of Our Economy, comes to the same conclusion. Extreme concentration of wealth corrupts the political and economic institutions that underlie economic success. Acemoglu and Robinson offer compelling evidence of it from 15 years of original research which they summarize here.

Extreme income inequality leads to political instability. That not only discourages investment, it also makes it harder to raise taxes or cut public spending to avoid a debt crisis, and it curtails poor people’s access to education. Increasingly extreme inequality makes government ever more polarized as demonstrated by Poole’s research summarized in: Ideological Polarization and Income Inequality and illustrated in the following chart:

Income inequality in the USA is not on a par with other advanced economies, members of the OECD, but with Bulgaria, Iran and Uganda.

How can we re-establish a more equal distribution of income and the associated economic growth? I’ve posted about changes to our financial (too-big-to-fail banks), healthcare and defense sectors and our tax system, but how can we get any such changes?

It’s time to explore governance. Every society is ruled by an elite. Our elite is elected to represent the interests of all. It does that at different times to a greater or lesser extent, substantially lesser at this time. What factors make the difference? What changes to our government should we consider?

Aug 8 2013

Buddhist Teachings – Series One

For anyone wishing to follow the advice in Alice in Wonderland – “Begin at the beginning”, the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop” – here are links that start at the beginning for the series of posts about my 2011 Tibetan Buddhist class.

Please, if you know of one, point me to an automated way to index posts in this order, not the usual sequence, most recent first.

If I Say I’m a Physicist

Tibetan Buddhist Class, First Two Days

I’ll do the same for the series about taxes.

Aug 6 2013

Tibetan Buddhist Class, Week Four

Our focus this week is on Tara whose 21 manifestations offer every aspect of compassion. As Green Tārā she protects against suffering, as White Tārā she heals wounds, as Red Tārā she teaches compassion, and as Blue Tārā she destroys all obstacles to awakening. She laughs at practitioners who become too serious and works to open our heart. Like Padmasambhava, the central figure of the previous sadhana, she appears as a beautiful 16 year-old but where his semi-wrathful appearance motivates our determination to dispel delusions, she offers playfully loving encouragement.

We offer praises to invoke Tara’s presence and take refuge in her nature. We chant aspirations for her help and recite her mantra while trying to visualize her as fully real as any other phenomena. By reciting her mantra and visualizing her, we aim to become imbued with her being and all it represents. Then we dissolve the visualization and dedicate our practice for the benefit of all beings.

Just as Padmasambhava did, Tara manifests from emptiness and is translucent like a rainbow. We aim to become inseparable from them and realize the emptiness both of our ordinary self and the visualization of our self as them, to realize that both our ordinary self and our self as deity are our creation. Neither one has inherent existence. We are working to recognize ultimate reality as it is, a display of emptiness and luminosity.

This practice is much simpler than the first one. There is only one text, fewer chants, and much less to visualize. It takes quite a long time to practice because there’s a lot of recitation of Tara’s mantra but it takes only two days for lama to explain the whole practice. He starts over again from the beginning on the third day so we will get the structure firmly fixed.

Lama also offers new details. One of Tara’s manifestations, he says, subdues zombies and all manner of other beings, too, including ones with horse heads and human bodies. All such beings are ways to visualize negative emotions that lead to negative actions. Lama has many tales about zombies.

Zombies are bodies inhabited by a demon who replaced the original occupant. There are none now, Lama says, because high lamas killed them all, which is unfortunate in a way because wherever there were zombies, you could be sure a high lama would soon appear, too. Those high lamas could make zombies work. One took a long pilgrimage all across Tibet and needed to bring a lot of stuff with him. He made a zombie carry it all. At the end of each day he told the zombie to stop. The zombie would crash to the ground and remain immobile ’til morning. Toward the end of the pilgrimage it started making a funny noise as it walked because its feet were almost worn through.

Another time, when the abbot of a monastery was nearing death, he told his lamas they must at all costs cut up and burn his body within three days of his death. But when the time came, they decided not to do that because even the lowest person is allowed to rest for a week. They laid him to rest and respectfully slept where his body lay. On the third night one young lama was too scared to sleep. At last he turned and placed his head where his feet should be so he could keep a close watch on the abbot’s body. Suddenly, its eyes opened, it sat up, rose to its feet and began touching each sleeping monk’s head. They instantly became zombies. The young monk escaped because only his feet were touched. He ran out, locked all the zombies in, and probably burned the monastery to the ground. Lama says he can’t attest to that last point. It’s his assumption based on other such incidents.

Lama says the reason for sky burial, the Tibetan tradition of cutting bodies into small pieces and leaving them for vultures, was to avert zombies. Since there are none now, sky burial is no longer necessary. The workers who cut up the bodies had to hide the heads because vultures, who are in fact special-purpose deities, like brains best. If they got brains first, they wouldn’t finish the flesh and other organs.

Some questions (italicized) about all this:

“Why is it OK to use the body even to the point of destruction just because it’s occupied by a demon?” Buddhists regard the body as a vehicle, just like a car, boat or bicycle. You want to be able to use it for a long time but at some point it will stop working and it then has no more value.

“Why are many of the stories jokes about hardship?” Cultures where life is hard tend to use humor as an anesthetic. Buddha wanted to find a better way, how to end suffering altogether. He said its causes are attachment, ignorance and hatred. Imagining how things are is ignorance. Imagining we have a self and our body is that self makes us fear damage to it, most of all death, because then our self would die. That we have no self to protect is hard to see. There is no aspect of what we imagine to be our self that is unchanging, many of its elements existed before our body was even conceived and many will continue to have effects after our body’s life ends. I get that intellectually but not yet experientially.

“The demons don’t exist now because high lamas killed them. What supposedly exists now that will be killed off in future?” Buddhist deities and demons represent qualities that do exist, so in that sense they are real. Their images and stories can engage us in a new conceptual understanding of reality. When our habitual concept and the new one seem equally plausible, we may see through both concepts and recognize what is truly present.

“Do any stories incorporate current events?” Mao Zedong, who drove the Dalai Lama and so many others out of Tibet is said to have been the manifestation of a deity who saw that Tibetans had stopped progressing spiritually and drove them out of their comfort zone. There was a report in yesterday’s newspaper about a mysterious sickness that caused the death of several hundred villagers. Zombies are suspected to be the culprits. They were killed in lama’s story but remained a force elsewhere.

Two more days of teaching and practice and the class is over. Now I have to figure out what to do next. I don’t feel ready, somehow, to benefit from making either of these sadhanas my daily practice. I sense that I should do something else first. [Note: That instinct was correct. The traditional path is to start with the Preliminary Practices. Some practitioners repeat them over and over again throughout their life. Others move on to more complex sadhanas like the ones we studied in these classes. Let me know if you’re interested and maybe I’ll write about Preliminary Practices sometime.]

Aug 4 2013

Tibetan Buddhist Class, Question Time

Before week four of the class, I want to respond to some great questions about Buddhism and kindness, Buddhist practice, and Buddhist thought.

About Buddhism and kindness: Harold commented on If I Say I’m a Physicist: “for me Buddhism is epitomized by how I treat a grandchild, with a great deal of caring and kindness. Now for some reason as people grow older we stop treating them like we would treat our young grandchildren. Understanding why that happens might bring greater understanding why we have so much conflict in the world.”

Fear distracts us from kindness. Old people are close to what we fear most, death. They remind us that we, too, will die. In societies with a low rate of infant mortality, we think small children are far from death.

Also, small children are vulnerable in an attractive way, not the sad-making way of old people. They develop rapidly in so many ways. It’s easy to help them and forgive their mistakes. But old people change in the opposite way. They grow weaker and make more mistakes. Sara commented beautifully about this, describing an experience with her frail, elderly mother.

And, we tend to be cautious with everyone else, people who are not very young or old, because they might be a threat and they are not so obviously vulnerable.

We can be more kind if we learn to be less fearful and more open to being kind to all, not just ones whose situation makes it easy. Training methods Buddhism offers can help and there are many other programs. It doesn’t matter what method(s) we use to approach the understanding Harold speaks of, only that we do train ourselves to be more kind.

About Buddhist practice: Bill wrote in response to Tibetan Buddhist Class, Week Two: “I didn’t realize there was so much complex ritual. Is this only done during meditation? Is it in this process that one may experience truth or insight? Is this how one learns the teachings of Buddha or how they’re put into practice?”

I wrote a little about ritual practice (sadhana) in Tibetan Buddhist Class, Week Three. There are much more complex and also much simpler ones than we’re learning in this class. This article points out how simple a sadhana can be: “There are three important aspects of sadhana: choice, commitment and aspiration. Even the most simple one will be challenging to the newcomer. Consider lighting a candle every night, then immediately blowing it out. Nothing more or nothing less. Do this for ninety days. You will observe the mind coming up with every reason why you shouldn’t do it and every excuse why you missed a few (or many) nights. Yet by accepting it as a sadhana, you make a choice to do it and it becomes a spiritual practice … Initially, it will challenge the mind and the ego. The spiritual “you” may even win the battle, but to keep it from becoming mechanical, an aspiration is required. Try this. Light the candle and say: ‘This is all I have to do for the benefit of self, other, and the world.’ Then blow out the candle. Doing only that will begin a transformation process that will alter your life.”

One Tibetan teacher I find helpful, Anam Thubten Rinpoche (ATR), teaches only silent meditation, like Zen practice. Sometimes, we just try to watch our thoughts arise – like watching waves roll in and disappear. Other times we try to understand what caused a thought to arise. When I asked ATR: “Could you have attained your realization if you only sat as we do, if you had not practiced the traditional rituals for many years?” He told me: “I had to do that. It was my karma. Different people need to train in different ways.” He believes complex rituals are an obstacle for most Westerners.

Most Tibetan teachers offer more complex practices. All the guides say the same thing, we must each find a practice and a teacher whose methods suit our unique set of thinking and emotional habits (karma). You may recognize your teacher instantly, it could take three years with one before you are sure, it will probably take ten years to absorb what a teacher can point out to you, then you probably need another one.

In a future post I’ll describe a simple tantric Buddhist practice. I understand this one only enough to see why so many tantric practices are held secret. They are paradoxical, intended to disrupt our habitual patterns of thought and emotion. Without guidance from a teacher, we would only form new obscuration. All these methods aim to break down habitual responses to enable more authentic perception and action.

The overall structure of Buddhist practice is: (1) study, (2) reflect and (3) meditate. We learn the teachings via study, understand how they apply to us via reflection, and effect change via meditation. If study is all we do, our behavior will not change. If we try to meditate without study or reflection, maybe our understanding will grow and our behavior will change, but it’s not likely.

About Buddhist thought: John wrote in response to Tibetan Buddhist Class, Week Two: “what would remain if I gradually eliminated all elements of that which forms my awareness of the “world” and of “me” … the “me” that used all my bodily functions to perceive “the world” still seems to “be”.

No “me” exists when I try that thought experiment, perhaps because I interpret “me” to mean a living, sentient being, but more fundamentally because I’m losing the sense that there are any beings or things with a persistent identity.

I am in much the same place as John, however, when he continues: “If this is true of “me” it must be true for all of “us”. What then differentiates “us”? perhaps each physical being has its own perceptions and memories that gives each the perception of individuality, but in reality we may only be ONE.”

Perhaps an analogy is useful. Nepal’s borders have no reality yet they do have real effects. The people and culture on either side of the Indian border are the same, the people and culture on either side of the Tibetan border are also the same, but the cultures of Nepalis close to India or Tibet are different. Plus, it’s all changing. In that way, borders have no reality. But the laws on either side of borders are different and their impact is real.

John’s conclusion is: “The difference from Buddhist thought being that I only tried to imagine what that final state of being would be like, I didn’t actually experience it as some Buddhist gurus claim to do.”

“Buddhist thought” means something different to me now. Phakchok Rinpoche says: “Buddhism is a method, not a belief system.” It is actually a method for discovering and destroying one’s beliefs, a tool not an end product. In other words, if “thought” means “belief”, there is no Buddhist thought. That makes it attractive to someone like me whose habit is to question all beliefs.

I do not hope to attain perfect understanding of Buddhist thought. What I am increasingly confident about is that analytical and intuitive thinking together with chanting, visualizing and other “skillful means” is helpful training for “me” to become more kind to more people. Unlike objectives I set in business, metrics in this sphere have no value. Whatever I achieve will be worthwhile.

martinsidwell.com

Exploring with an Open Mind and an Opening Heart

Author Archives: admin