According to the Dalai Lama, you cannot own an image of the buddha, you are merely its guardian while it resides with you. The buddha that lives with me seems to have an agenda. I installed him properly: his eyes higher than mine so I have to gaze up at him slightly. I lit the incense, applied a bit of gold leaf. I wai him when I pass in front of him. There are times when I sit and just gaze at his face. But he seems to want something more.
I almost brought a less stern buddha home, thought this one looked a bit judgemental. But living with him has revealed something else. He's seems to know I'm going to make mistakes. This isn't going to be my last time round, no imminent nirvana on the horizon. But he also has taught me it's the effort that counts, the attempts to make merit, transcend the daily onslaught of need, want, desire, covetousness, jealousy.
The first buddhist country I visited was Cambodia, in 2000. Cambodia was just starting to open itself up again to the West. There were very few automobiles; we saw whole families riding on one moped. It seemed strangely quiet, until I realized (and this after 9/11 when the planes were grounded and cars and trucks stopped grinding their way along three major highway systems close to New York) it was the absence of mechanized sound that gave that stange echoing quality to the air. It was the quiet of a pre-industrialized society, maliciously un-industrialized, de-industrialized by the Khmer Rouge, and fighting its way back to something, but what?
It took 5 years for me to get back to Asia, this time to Thailand, a far more developed country, with its skytrains and five star hotels. But the spirit I'd seen in the Cambodian people seemed to eminate out of the Thais. So I started thinking about what they share. Could it be a buddhist perspective on the world?
I've started this blog today, the day before Thanksgiving, to scatter my own spiritual breadcrumbs into the googled spiders of the internet search engines, to post links to causes I believe in, future rants against a world I buy into as much as one I fight.
I'm grateful my buddha, who I've just borrowed after all, doesn't expect perfection. I'm far from capable of that. But this is my attempt to leave the world a bit of a better place than I found it.
