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I know a true story of a miracle, involving a Buddhist monk...
Don't worry, this will be brief, and... [laughs]
There was a very senior Buddhist monk from a Thai lineage, and he was surrounded by, uh... hangers-on and flunkies who believed in homeopathy
and hippy alternative medicine, this kind of thing.
He had one of the problems in his eye that required surgery, and if you don't get the
surgery performed on your eye it will progressively get worse and worse, and you'll go blind,
it will become inoperable. And he's surrounded by people who are telling
him, "Don't get surgery", "Use this alternative medicine", "Use some kind of magical cure"...
And he decides, "Okay, I'm a Buddhist monk, I'm supposed to believe in magic of various
kinds, I'll give it a try." He takes off his robes, [and this is] controversial
[because] he's already breaking the rules by taking off his robes and dressing like
a normal layperson, he gets on an airplane, and he flies to India,
to receive faith-healing from the famous Hindu sage Sai Baba.
I guess I'm putting "sage" in quotation marks. If you haven't heard of Sai Baba, he did all
kinds of magic tricks on stage, including direct sleight-of-hand (real magician's tricks),
but he also did faith-healing. [So this Buddhist monk] goes to be healed
by Sai Baba. Standing in a row, there's a hallway full
of people getting healed by Sai Baba. I think it's during his act, y'know, he performs on
stage, he heals people on stage, and then he keeps going down a row [of], I dunno, a
hundred people (I don't know how many people) who are waiting to be healed.
He's coming down the row, and he's magically laying hands on people, healing people, one
after another after another, and then he comes to this Buddhist monk, who's dressed like
a normal person... [Laughs] He comes to this Buddhist monk, and
he stops. He looks him in the face, and he says, "Get
the surgery". [Laughs] He doesn't heal him, and then he keeps going down the line, faith-healing
all the rest of the people. It's a true story. It's a true story, and
it's the only miracle I can name for you, because it's the miracle of a miracle-worker
deciding not to perform a miracle. He did have the surgery. The surgery worked.
This isn't about to turn into a cooking show, but I just made myself a vegan protein "milkshake"
and I thought, hey, keep it real, let it sit out while I'm talking to the camera.
[I'll] start with an example. Maybe the examples are easier to relate to than the kind of theoretical
question I wanted to talk about, really quickly in this video.
I had a guy visit me a couple of weeks ago, and he's a smart, well-educated guy, probably
one of the smartest people I've talked to in the last five years, and, uh, we talked
about Buddhism for several hours, and, of course, by the end of that time he really
had a sense of how many years I've worked on Buddhism and my depth of knowledge about
the history and other issues. But then he stopped at one point, and he told
me with real excitement, after we'd been talking about all kinds of problems of philosophy,
corruption, history, and he stopped and he told me with his eyes glowing, that he knew
one Buddhist temple that didn't have any of these problems, because, at this one temple,
he said, they just worship statues (they worship this particular god) and if you ask them anything
about Buddhist philosophy, they just preach the doctrine of "not knowing".
They just preach the doctrine that none of them know anything, and there are no answers
to any questions. Sounds great. And, y'know, this guy, again, he's not an idiot; he's really
quite bright, but I could see he was taken in by this.
And my response was not to question the value of a bunch of monks preaching that they don't
know anything, but to ask him a hypothetical question: how would he feel if I told him
the exact same thing about a Catholic monastery in Italy, where the monks just worship a god,
and if you wanna ask them any questions, they just preach their own pious ignorance? How
would he feel if I knew about an Eastern Orthodox temple somewhere in Russia where people professed
the same doctrine? Right away, his whole expression changed.
The concept of "pious ignorance" has a pretty deep history in Christianity, and, um, it
isn't well-suited to Buddhism at all. If you know anything about the history and philosophy
of Buddhism, it's got to be the most anti-ignorance religion going, although a lot of people conveniently
ignore that side of it. But in posing the question in this way, what
I was challenging was the mystique of the exotic that, really, for him, made the idea
of pious ignorance seem appealing. And, right away, if he was just visualizing how he would
feel, how he would respond, if we were talking about white, western people, doing the same
thing, with the same excuses, in a western setting, then, suddenly, it didn't seem so
appealing anymore. My own sense of apprehension of "the exotic"
and of how people tend to turn off their own rational faculties once something is declared
exotic actually is much earlier than my interest in Buddhism.
When I was working on European philosophy, I was shocked (shocked is the word) that there
were other people the same age as myself, going to university, who were willing to pretend
that somebody living in 19th century Germany (y'know, 19th century German philosophy was
somewhat popular at the time)... that someone from 19th century Germany represented an "exotic"
and alien culture that was somehow disconnected from the rest of the history of the world.
And, of course, those philosophies (all the philosophies of 19th century Germany) are
caught up in debates about racism, religion, slavery. And other young people from the same
culture as myself, the same age as myself, they were making excuses for these philosophers,
saying, "Well, uh, they didn't mean to be racist, they just didn't know what they were
talking about at the time". And whenever I would challenge that by saying,
"Well, what are you talking about? When this book was published, we're just a few decades
before the American Civil War. All of those debates around slavery, those are all in the
newspapers, in England, in France, and in Germany. These are the events going on in
the British Empire and the French Empire... it's just not true that people in Europe were
ignorant of the ethnic and religious politics, of the issue of slavery in particular". But
I could see that in their minds, they were trying to separate this exotic island that
their philosophy came from (their pet philosophy) from the political and historical reality
of the rest of the world. And a lot of white people around me do that
with Buddhism to an extent that I find scary. It's not with a lack of sympathy that I say...
and, again, you can see something click in people's eyes when you talk to them about
this stuff... but if you're talking to someone who thinks of a man wearing robes as if he's
ancient (as if he comes from 2,500 years ago) and you say, "Oh yeah, yeah, I know the monk
you're talking about", or, "I know the temple you're talking about".
"Yeah, the most senior monks there, who are now retiring and dying of old age, those guys
were World War Two veterans." "Yeah, yeah, and then the next generation
up, that replaced them, they had this kind of education, they came out of this type of
military background, a few were farmers..." As soon as you put it into the timeline of
events like World War Two, the Vietnam War, you can see that mystique of the exotic falling
from people's eyes, as they're forced to recognize that we really are talking about modern people,
who are part of the same history, the same ongoing history as the western world.
And [we're talking about] people who've learned about Buddhism in ways that are not so different
from ourselves. I've had the privilege that many monks were
honest with me in talking about their own background.
Many monks their story is, "Well, I finished my life in the military, and then I tried
this line of work, I didn't like it, I thought I'd try being in the monastery; I had a cousin
who knew somebody in this monastery, so I went..."
You know, very human, the stories that bring people into the life of a Buddhist monk. And
I say that with all sympathy. But you have to sympathize with the human reality, not
with some kind of abstract, unreal, otherworldly reality, that, of course, can never be real.
When we set up a barrier between us and them, and we look across a division that exoticizes
what's foreign, really, the most dangerous part of it is that we're giving ourselves
an excuse to suspend judgement. We're giving ourselves an excuse to turn off the rational
part of our minds, that we would apply to even someone like a Catholic monk (instead
of a Buddhist monk), and that we would apply to someone who was selling you a medical treatment,
as opposed to an "alternative" treatment, or a religious practice that's supposed to
get the same results. When I look at the medical excuses that are
made for Buddhist meditation, and for buying and selling Buddhist meditation, it's very
sad to me, in that way, because I feel that the people who are willing to suspend their
disbelief for this exotic, foreign, religious practice, would never do the same thing for
prayer (Christian prayer), [they] would never do the same thing for even exercise and changes
in diet. They would be very skeptical if they were told they would get the same results
from changes in diet and exercise, although, scientifically, it may work, but there's just
enough of a veneer of the exotic for them to turn off the critical faculty of their
brain, and embrace uncritically what's bought and sold as meditation today.