You dress so gay

Parents in Malaysia! Beware! If your son likes to wear V-neck shirts, it's because he's gay and wants to show off his body to other boys!

And your daughters, if they prefer the company of only some girls, but not all girls, look out - they're lesbian!

Seriously? o_O

Yes, the Malaysian government is at it again. It's all over the news in Asia, but also getting attention with some Western press and bloggers.

I wrote about efforts in Malaysia to revive reparative therapy techniques to turn ladyboys into real men, so I won't recover all of that. But it seems the Malaysian government is really paranoid about having gays within the populace and is soliciting the help of parents and teachers in spotting this scourge so something can be done about it.

As I've said before, it would all be laughable if it weren't so freaking real. The seminars being hosted in Penang, which has been known to have a lively gay scene, are the fourth conducted in the country. Despite that lively scene in Penang, a friend of mine who lives there is absolutely scared to death to have anyone find out he is gay.

Buddhism is about refuge and I have found the Buddha's teachings to be excellent support for gay practitioners. Yes, there are Buddhist commentators and teachers who adopt homophobia as part of their doctrine, but that's their doctrine, not the Buddha's. When I launched this blog a little more than three years ago, I wrote about how our coming out process was a liberating experience very much like the liberating feeling we experience when we encounter the Dhamma.

I hope our family in Malaysia remains strong throughout this, regardless of their religious point of view. Some meditative sessions on loving kindness are  probably in order. And the more musclely straight men who wear colorful V-necks and carry big satchels, the better.

There’s a Little Wayman in all of us

What can a Jataka tale about a dullard novice whose brother attempts to expel him from the Buddha’s Sangha teach us about our own potential as gay practitioners? Quite a bit, it seems, as long as we persevere even when facing what seems to be the darkest of times and we allow ourselves to be guided by the calling that comes from within our own hearts rather than the admonitions and even shouts from the world around us.

This isn’t always easy, particularly when stories like this continue to occur.

The Buddha taught that how we live our present life will determine the condition and circumstances of our rebirth. The simplistic way of looking at this leads us to conclude that living a good, moral life will not only bring us happiness now, but also greater happiness in our next life. But kamma isn’t so simple, not so linear. And it’s easy for us as gay people to fall into a line of thinking that the fact we are born gay is a negative consequence for something we may have done in a previous life – that is if you accept the notion of rebirth. Not all Buddhists do.

In some instances within the Tipitika, the Buddha explicitly states that living a good life now will lead to a good or better next life, but these situations usually involve the laity and times when the Buddha crafted his teaching according to his audience. When one considers the entirety of the Tipitika, however, one sees that what the Buddha was more likely attempting to convey was that living a good moral life would bring one closer to Nibbana, to total release, with each successive rebirth, regardless of the specific circumstances one was born into each time.

Humans in general have many hang-ups regarding sex, so it stands to reason that many Buddhist teachers – even very well-respected teachers – have hang-ups not just about sex in general, but about homosexuals in particular. Many of these teachers suggest that being homosexual is a consequence of our previous lives, the results of kamma. I agree with this, but not the same way as these teachers suggest. This is because I don’t subscribe to a linear notion of kamma and rebirth, that not every successive existence is necessarily better than the last even when the prior existence was an exemplary life. And I offer the Cullaka-Setthi-Jātaka to explain this.

In this Jātaka tale, we have two brothers, Wayman and Little Wayman, who come from humble beginnings. The elder Wayman joins the Buddha’s Sangha and, finding the monastic life to be fulfilling, entices his younger brother to become a monk as well. But Little Wayman proves to be a dullard, unable to learn the teachings and fails to remember even the simplest of gathas. So Wayman takes it upon himself to expel his brother from the Sangha.

Being omniscient, the Buddha becomes aware of this and intercedes. There are some really wonderful passages in this story, but I don’t want to bog things down, so I will skip over many of the details. But the Buddha gives Little Wayman a clean cloth for the novice to wipe his face and head. When Little Wayman does this, he sees how the cloth becomes soiled and eventually comes to realize that it represents how he is removing the soil of his delusions and expelling them from his mind. This young novice was ready for this teaching and became an arahant. The Buddha explains to the others how this happened by revealing what he knows about Little Wayman’s previous lives.

In a previous life, Little Wayman was destitute and poor, but, as a young man then, he overheard a wealthy treasurer make a statement about taking an opportunity and profiting from it. That young man took that advice and within four months became extraordinarily wealthy. He returned to the wealthy treasurer (who was the Buddha in a previous life) who gave the young man a job and allowed him to marry his daughter. In this previous life, Little Wayman was no dullard, but a very apt pupil with the potential to realize great things as long as he persevered. But here’s an interesting twist.

Despite rising to be a wealthy merchant in that previous life, Little Wayman was re-born poor to parents of mixed parentage. His mother came from wealth, but she married a slave, bringing shame to her offspring. So Little Wayman was not reborn into steadily rising social circumstances; rather, he was reborn into circumstances that prepared him for his eventual enlightenment.

As homosexuals we aren’t reborn gay as a negative consequence for something that we did in a previous life. And heterosexuals aren’t reborn straight as a positive consequence. It just simply is. But the circumstance of our present life is the result of what has happened before and probably reflects our growing ability to “hear” the Dhamma with the right ears. We are where we are because of the path we took, regardless of whether we are conscious of how far we have traveled over the eons. Those who sit in a self-exalted state to proclaim they know why we were born gay are only revealing their stubborn clinging to delusion.

Little Wayman almost gave up because he believed his older brother who told him he failed. As a result, they both were about to fail by giving up not only on each other, but on themselves. The cycle of their rebirths, fortunately, brought the two of them to the Buddha who helped them see release despite their humble beginnings.

The photo with this post is not mine, and I want to express thanks for the permission to use it.

Making a chai tae out of a kathoey, or real man out of a fag

Got a sissy-boy child? Send him to a reparative therapist who attests he or she can “straighten” your boy out. Even if it kills him. Literally.

These types of “clinics” and “therapists” were fairly common in the not-too-distant past in the United States, but for the most part have been professionally ridiculed as not only ineffective, but as psychological quackery and mental torture. There remain a few who still push this dangerous fake therapy, the most infamous being the laughable George Rekers.

More recently, similar clinics have turned up in Malaysia, which is led by a homophobic Islamic (is that redundant?) government that has for years been trying to convict a dissident of sodomy. These clinics were for “sissy boys” and asserted they could turn your sissy boy into a real man. Unsurprisingly, many reparative therapists took up the torch – oh, how ironic – to practice this voodoo psychology in Malaysia where they found a willing client: The Malaysian government, which allegedly forced boys into the treatment centers. Despite international condemnation, the Malaysian government essentially replied with a hearty “fuck you.”

A side note: To really understand Malaysia’s antipathy toward gays, you need to know the history behind the government’s attempt to denounce and prosecute dissident Anwar Ibrahim. The government wants to get rid of him so badly, but the only thing they can come up with is an accusation of sodomy.

But I digress. Because that’s not the end of it. While it may not surprise you that conservative Christian groups and Islamic groups continue to support efforts to change one’s sexuality, it may surprise you to learn that Buddhist organizations, teachers and even various Sanghas have been involved in reparative therapy as well. And a recent news report of a particular Thai Sangha’s involvement in treating so-called “ladyboys” infuriates me no end, as this strikes me as a complete corruption of the Dhamma as well as some of the worst kind of homophobia I’ve seen.

To get a good grasp about how this issue operates in Thailand and most of Southeast Asia, one needs to understand both how the Sangha fits into Thai culture, as well as understand the history of the kathoey, or ladyboy, both in Thai culture and Buddhist history. For this explanation, I’m going to rely heavily on a work by Peter A. Jackson called “Male Homosexuality and Transgenderism in the Thai Buddhist Tradition.” Granted, this work dates back to 1993, but it nonetheless presents excellent background on this issue.

There remains a very strong link between the Sangha and lay community in SE Asia, where families in Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia send their boys to the Sangha for short periods where they learn Dhamma and live as a novice monk. Some decide to stay. Most return to their families and lay life. This is such a strong tradition that a recent survey revealing that many Thais no longer support the Sangha like they had in the past has made headlines in the local press.

Many may have a perspective that Thais are generally very tolerant and accepting of homosexuality. After all, sex clubs have been ubiquitous in Bangkok and Pataya (not as much so in Phuket), and if you type the search terms “ladyboy” and “Thailand” into Google, you’ll get a plethora of results for various websites offering a variety of services performed by such ladyboys.

True, there are no laws against homosexual activity in Thailand as there are in Malaysia to the south, but to conclude that homosexuality is widely accepted in Thailand would be very unskillful. It’s not uncommon for Thai police to raid gay bars just for the hell of it, much like police did in the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s. What made the attitude different in Thailand from that in the West, Jackson points out, was the Thai attitude toward homosexuality was largely diffused: it lacked a specific target. The AIDS epidemic in Thailand changed all that; it gave people who initially harbored vague feelings of antipathy toward homosexuals an opportunity to target aggressive hatred.

But where did this seed of homophobia come from? Believe it or not, it came from several Thai Buddhist teachers from the past whose homophobic interpretations of the Tipitika have been carried forward by more recent members of the Thai Sangha. As was largely the case with Christianity and Biblical texts, the Buddhist canon contains sections referring to certain, specific sexual activity and attitudes. But given the fact that there was no Western concept of homosexuality 2,500 years ago in Asia, modern Buddhist “interpreters” have tended to force the concept of homosexuality onto Pali terms and descriptions of activity that appear similar to what the Western mind labels as “homosexual.”

Another thing to keep in mind is the Pali canon, and Thai Buddhism in particular, contains a very strong anti-sex message directed specifically toward monks.

“That which is called methunadhamma is explained as: the dhamma of an unrighteous man (asattapurisa), the conduct of the common people, the manners of the low, dhamma which is evil and crude, dhamma whose end is but water, an activity which should be hidden, the dhamma which couples should perform together.” (Vinaya, Vol. 1, p.49)

While the message was strident, it did not differentiate between forms. All types of sex were covered: it didn’t matter what a monk stuck his penis into, such activity always carried the same result – the monk had failed and was usually expelled from the Sangha. But a distaste for all forms of sex, even among the laity, found its way into the commentaries of many Thai Buddhist writers. Jackson writes:

“Significantly, contemporary Thai Buddhist views on laypersons' sexual behaviour are often more proscriptive and extreme than attitudes reflect in the Pali canon or in traditional or popular Thai accounts of Buddhist doctrine and ethics. Phra Buddhadasa's work has been especially influential among educated and middle class Thai Buddhists. However, his views on sexuality are at variance with Thai Buddhism's traditional distinction between lay and clerical ethical conduct. The ethical extremism of Phra Buddhadasa and other contemporary Buddhist reformists in Thailand such as Phra Phothirak results from a clericalising trend whereby ethical demands traditionally made only of monks are now increasingly also being required of laypersons.”

This anti-sex attitude remains to this day not only in the Thai Sangha, but to a large extent within general Thai society among the laity in the form of homophobia.

The term "kathoey" in Thai loosely translates as "ladyboy" and has a somewhat interesting history in Buddhist literature. The term has been translated to include everything from hermaphrodites to being a descriptive term for a weakling or eunuch. The Pali term pandaka has been used to describe virtually any sexual deviant, but was most frequently used to describe homosexual activity. Jackson writes:

“But whether or not Buddhism has been instrumental in influencing the development of the popular Thai notion, a very similar mixing of physical and psychological sex, gender behaviours and sexuality occurs both in the Pali terms pandaka and in the Thai term kathoey. Both terms are parts of conceptual schemes in which people regarded as exhibiting physiological or culturally ascribed features of the opposite sex are categorised together. If Buddhism was not the source of the popular Thai conception of kathoey then at the very least it has reinforced a markedly similar pre-existing Thai cultural concept.”

Jackson further states that the term kathoey has largely transformed in general Thai vernacular to be used to describe any gay man, whether a cross-dresser or straight-acting, so nowadays it essentially translates as "fag."

It is unfortunate that so many Thai commentators and their subsequent followers developed and promoted such anti-gay sentiments as there are some very interesting references in the Pali canon to the Buddha showing great tolerance toward those whose sexual identity did not follow the norm.

There was Ananda, the Buddha’s cousin and personal attendant, who allegedly was born a kathoey in many previous lives and who became an arahant shortly after the Buddha became enlightened. And there is the story of Vakkali, who was enamored with the Buddha. The Buddha rebuked Vakkali for constantly staring lustfully at the Buddha, but his rebuke was not a “stop looking at me that way gay boy,” but rather, stop falling into the trap of sensual attachment. Nonetheless, the Buddha told Vakkali to go away. Jackson writes:

"Vakkali was so shattered by this command that he attempted to kill himself by jumping off a mountain. But deva or spiritual beings informed the Buddha of Vakkali's dejection and he quickly went to the monk's aid in time to save him from committing suicide. With an extremely brief exposition of the dhamma, 'The eyes see dhamma,' the Buddha gave Vakkali the insight he needed in order to attain enlightenment and he immediately attained arahantship."

Nonetheless, there is a proscription against ordaining a pandaka that is attributed to the Buddha based on a tale in the Vinaya about a monk who was running around the Sangha asking the young monks to “fuck me, fuck me.” When they didn’t oblige, the pandaka went to the elephant stables and again pleaded with the men there to “fuck me, fuck me.” When the Buddha heard about this, he expelled the pandaka because he was concerned what the lay community might think about the Sangha. This has created considerable controversy today over whether openly gay men should be allowed to be ordained.

Now we arrive to the year 2011 when effeminate boys are being sent to Sanghas where monks are attempting to transform them from being pandaka or kathoey into real men, or chai tae. At work here is probably centuries of indoctrinated homophobia.

The renunciation of sexual desire, whether same-sex or opposite-sex, is for the monastic community and has everything to do with renouncing sensual pleasure of all types. For the monks to teach these “ladyboys” to become "real men" would mean guiding these boys in the ways of hetero sex. The fact that monks would even venture into that territory at all with young novices strikes me as a serious corruption of Dhamma, as well as a particularly virulent form of homophobia sustained by reactionary abbots who don't know what to do with the ordained ladyboys in their midst.

And again we come back to the psychological trauma such reparative therapy can create in young minds. This isn’t the ending of suffering, this constitutes the nurturing and encouragement of suffering. Many of these boys will simply reject the efforts and return to their previous ways after they leave the Sangha. But others may likely be so traumatized that they commit suicide or develop seriously self-destructive behaviors. From being happy, these boys are “transformed” into miserable waifs.

Shameful. Shameful. Where is Rahula when you need him? Where is the water dipper?

Join the discussion on Facebook!

I’ve created a Facebook page for My Buddha is Pink. While I will continue to blog here the way I have been, I think the Facebook page will allow for greater flexibility to cover other Buddhist and gay-related topics. More discussions, links to news and events, and just plain sharing and socializing.

I hope you take a look here at the page and become a fan. And when you do, join the discussion! I’ve already asked a question about the individualistic nature of the Buddhist practice and how to balance that with a need to develop a community of practitioners that identify together as more than just Buddhist. It’s been a topic from time to time throughout the Buddhist blogosphere.

What’s happening in Singapore is a gay Buddhist group called Heartland is feeling pressure from local Christian groups that create social activities to not only attract new members, but to strengthen relationships between current members.

In Asia, Buddhist practice in many places is very ritualistic and individualistic. People come to a temple to make offerings, pray, chant, meditate and make prostrations. But seldom are there regularly scheduled activities to bring congregants together for social activities.

Many ethnically-based temples in the U.S. do create social activities for members, but often these are centered on sustaining the members’ cultural identity.

Certainly we have discussed throughout the various blogs the “Westernization” of Buddhism and what that means. Does it mean Anglifying it? Or does it mean blending the practice American culture that makes the practice relevant and attractive without crushing the core concepts under the weight of commercial superficiality?

Stop by my new page and let’s get the discussion rolling!

Four Noble Truths for Lesbians

After crafting the Revised Four Noble Truths for gays, I thought I’d take a stab at a similar post for the grrls. It’s a tough crowd, one not afraid to express itself (did you notice how I capitalized 'Lebsian' but left 'gay' lower case for the boys?). But no matter who we are, if we take ourselves too seriously, nobody pays attention. So here it is ladies, unabashed and audience tested.

Now this – all you lipstick lesbians, diesel dykes, cat-women dominatrix, flip-flop wearing Peppermint Patties, matronly moms, stressed-out bodybuilders, long-legged beach queens, beehive homemakers, grease-pit goddesses, and thin-lipped librarian types – is the noble truth of stress:

Having a middle-aged man call you “honey” is stressful; having a gorgeous young girl call you ma’am is stressful; being repeatedly asked by straight people if you own a motorcycle is stressful; learning your girlfriend really does want a penis is stressful; running into a bi guy at a gay bar is stressful; having arm-flailing gay men in front of you at an Indigo Girls concert is stressful; meeting a really super nice straight girl who likes you a lot but isn’t going to sleep with you is stressful; broken carburetors are stressful; having to change a tire for a gay man is stressful; finding out your date hasn’t got a clue about what Scissor Sisters is a reference for is stressful; having someone ask you if you’re lipstick or diesel when if they’d just open their fucking eyes they’d know is stressful; getting a breast exam is stressful; getting a PAP smear by a gynecologist that sniffles is stressful; being constantly asked if you hate men is stressful; being mistaken for a boy is stressful; being mistaken for a girl is stressful; having to be asked yet again whether Annie Leibovitz is a lesbian is stressful; trying to figure out why Willa Cather mostly wrote about men is stressful; being asked about Chastity Bono when you don’t even like Cher is stressful; not having enough candles is stressful. In short, the entire glamorous life of a lesbian is stressful.

And this, my sensational sisters, is the origination of stress: Expecting male sexist pigs to treat you with respect; forgetting that you’re not 22 anymore; failing to understand that body art can at times give the wrong impression; wishing you had watched “Boys Don’t Cry”; under-appreciating gamblers; stubbornly sticking to the idea that there are some places you can still keep us out of; failing to appreciate that you are a likeable person; not buying a car with fuel injection; not realizing that changing the tire is the source of the stress rather than for whom you are changing it; thinking that Internet dating service profiles are truthful; expecting others to have the same level of awesome awareness that you have; failing to appreciate the real First Noble Truth; refusing to acknowledge it was your decision to accept the job with the lame-assed health plan; allowing yourself to continue to be shocked whenever you encounter ignorance; continuing to allow your self-worth to be determined by others; see previous; not taking it seriously how many people get their information from Fox News; yeah, that’s a tough one to figure out; forgetting that most people – including gays – just don’t get the transgendered thing; yeah, what is it with you grrls and candles? This is how you stress yourself.

And this, my sisters in saintliness, is the noble truth of the cessation of stress. That which is the letting go of the desire to control how others think, the freeing yourself of trying to be someone other than who you truly are, the embracing of the present moment in all its roughness and ambiguity, the understanding that the value of you as a person is not determined by external factors but rather by the generosity in your heart and your willingness to protect Nellie queens from gay-bashing morons, and the abandonment of the condescending mind that drives you to seek fulfillment at Home Depot.

And this, my sardonic scissor sisters, is the path leading to the ending of all that stress, the Noble Queerfold Path which leads to inner peace and multiple orgasms: Right Spending, Right Friends, Right Self-value, Right Sincerity, Right Honor, Right Compassion, Right Love, and Right Restraint.

Of course, the items in the Noble Queerfold Path, while laudable, are not the same as the Noble Eightfold Path. And certainly, anyone serious about following the Buddha’s path should pay more attention to the latter than the former. But whether you’re a pixyish boy with blue hair or a big-boned mamma laying roof shingles, there is value in the Queerfold Path. And peace as well.

A revised Four Noble Truths for Gays

Adam over at Fly Like a Crow has an awesome post about the Four Noble Truths of Parenting. His post was so inspiring – and girls you better read it! – that I had to come up with a new Four Noble Truths for Gays. True I had written about such a litany in the past, but let’s update it a bit and get a bit cheeky, shall we?

And so here they are, the Four Noble Truths for circuit partying homos and other “sexual deviants .”

Now this – all you go-go boys, bears, twinks, muscle queens, leather daddies, angora queens, closet cases, dragalicious divas, nerds and straight-acting-total-bottoms – is the noble truth of stress: body waxing is stressful, pyramid workouts are stressful, cold sores are stressful, smegma stench is stressful, Christina Aguilera is stressful, a sold-old Scissor Sisters concert when you don’t have a ticket is stressful, a Cosmo with too much lime is stressful, new leather chaps are stressful, dance floors so crowded you can’t move are stressful, finding out the dude you just hit on is underage is stressful, having your credit card rejected is stressful, not being carded at the door is stressful, learning that you can’t buy “The Pool Boy” anymore because Brent Corrigan was only 16 when he made it is stressful, finding out it wasn’t just a cold sore is stressful, genital wart removal is stressful, returning home to find out that you already have the shirt you just bought is stressful, finding out your liaison doesn’t like to kiss is stressful, worrying that you perspire too much in light clothing is stressful, waiting for your HIV test results is stressful, pushing on a Marine's bellybutton and his legs don't go up in the air is stressful, seeing your date in pleated trousers is stressful. In short, the entire glamorous life of being gay is stressful.

And this, my fellow moes, is the origination of stress: desiring a hairless body when your genes come from a gorilla, wanting a chiseled body that that will turn to flab when you retire, needing to look flawless before you go out, not paying attention to body odor before you decide to sniff the swarthy saber, not having better taste in music, waiting too long to buy your ticket, knowing the bartender doesn’t know how to make a fucking Cosmo but you order it anyway because you want to be seen with it, not knowing about Bick leather conditioner, wanting to flail about like an unhinged dancing queen, forgetting that interest in you is not always genuine, because you’re unwilling to live within your means, forgetting that yes we do get old, you should have bought “The Pool Boy” while it was still available, having a sexual appetite that overrides reason and prudence, see previous clause, you’re getting old, expecting a casual sex encounter to be the same as doing someone you really care about, failing to know how to dress, failing to accept the fact that multiple partners means multiple risks, reading too much into the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, thinking you can find happiness in an online dating service. This is how you stress yourself.

And this, my brethren moes, is the noble truth of the cessation of stress: The letting go of the compulsion to be someone other than who you are, understanding that your worth as a person is not defined by how much you spend, nor is it defined by how others view you, and realizing a craving for sex is connected with your self-perceived value as a person (you are attempting to reproduce the affection you missed as a child), and a failure to pay attention to common fashion magazines like Details.

And this, my fellow queens and moes, is the path leading to the ending of all that stress, the Noble Queerfold Path which leads to inner peace and an intense orgasm: Right Spending, Right Friends, Right Self-value, Right Sincerity, Right Honor, Right Compassion, Right Love, and Right Restraint.

Oh shit, I just realized that now I will have to blog about each of these in the true Noble Queerfold Path. But you know what, I think I will have fun doing that.

Why couldn’t I help you Lance?

I would not normally write about and identify any of the children I used to work with, but in Lance’s case I’m going to make an exception, because, you see, Lance is dead.

The details are hazy as it happened many years ago, but as I recall, Lance took a pistol and shot himself in the head. I think he was 15 at the time. The specifics are immaterial, and when one doesn’t know all the facts, the facts become mixed with rumor until truth can no longer be separated from fiction.

All that matters for now is Lance is dead. And while it remains speculation, I have a pretty good idea as to why.

Lance was a handsome, energetic, athletic and mischievous boy from Texas. His smile was infectious. He honestly tried to please others, but like many boys his age diagnosed with ADD, his mouth and actions often got ahead of his brain, leading him to say and do things he quickly regretted.

He was a student at the private boarding school where I worked as a cabin counselor. The school, up in the mountains of Northern New Mexico, was for teens diagnosed with learning disabilities. It was a beautiful natural setting that offered tremendous opportunities for outdoor activities in the surrounding national forest. I took students on many hikes and backpack trips into the mountains there and not just for recreation. I’ve always believed that the wilderness is an effective teacher of many things; it will humble the most arrogant teen and in the flash of a moment, will show you death for what it really is.

I liked Lance. I remember on a hike one day up the steep slope of a ridge by the school, we encountered a rock outcropping that was about 12 feet high. You could walk around it, but it was an excellent opportunity to do a little free climbing without any serious risk. I was amazed at Lance’s agility as he easily climbed up the rock face, finding the right handholds and swinging his body up to another tiny ledge where he paused briefly horizontal to the ground before using his wiry strength to pull himself to the top of the outcropping.

It really was a beautiful and awe-inspiring site.

Later in the year there was hushed talk about an incident between Lance and another boy in his cabin. Lance’s normally bright demeanor was subdued and gloomy. The once loquacious boy had become taciturn and morose. I was just 24 years old at the time, struggling with my own sexuality. Intuitively, I sensed a similar struggle within Lance. So I took a risk.

Lance’s cabin counselor agreed to let Lance come over to my cabin after lights out to chat. Talk about an uncomfortable meeting. I let Lance know I knew what occurred between him and the other boy. I also let him know I wasn’t going to tell him that there was something wrong with him. Rather, I wanted to find out what he thought about the situation. How was he going to deal with it? What happened, I said, didn’t mean he was gay. But the incident wasn’t going to go away.

There was one other time I approached another boy, also from another cabin and at the request of his counselor. (Was it that obvious to others? “Send the kid to Rich, he knows how to deal with that kind of thing.”) In that situation, I made an obvious mistake. The boy’s reaction to my inquiries, despite how oblique they were, clearly let me know I was making a mistake.

With Lance, however, I believed I was right. He gave me the non-denial denial, never clearly denying what others were saying had happened, nor clearly denying that he had sexual feelings for other boys. But he remained closed up. Never had I seen someone suppress their tears so effectively. He wanted to tell me something, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. I told him that anytime he needed to talk about anything, I would be there.

That was late in the school year. Lance brightened up a bit and finished the year on a good note. He opted to return to public school the following fall, so he did not come back to our school.

About six weeks into the next school year, I was doing something in the office when someone grabbed me and said, “Hey, Lance is on the phone, he just called and asked if you were there.” At the time, I thought it was odd for Lance to call like that. But I shrugged it off. I took the phone and asked Lance how things were going at his new school. Not so well, he said. He was calling from home, he had just been suspended. His parents weren’t home yet. He was worried how they might react.

I think I asked Lance what had happened at school to get him suspended, but I can’t remember whether he again evaded my question or gave me an answer. I remember telling him he would get through this. And I remember telling him thanks for calling and asking for me. I told him I liked him, he was a good kid.

A week later I heard the news. Lance had shot himself dead. He did it on the same day that he called the school. He must have shot himself shortly after the phone call.

Long pause because I’m crying right now.

I don’t blame myself for what happened to Lance. But goddamnit, what a fucked up situation that was. It was the 1980s when everything said about gays had AIDS connected to it. I was in my 20s, confused about my own sexuality trying to talk to a 14-year-old who was just as confused. I was deathly afraid of anyone finding out. My position at the school would be ruined. Even though I had never done anything in the least inappropriate with any of the boys at that school – and while I worked there I had personal knowledge of at least three other counselors who had sex with students, two involving male counselors with female students and the third a male counselor with a male student (and there are a couple other instances that while I didn’t have personal knowledge, I have strong evidence, a lot can happen in five years) – I knew that if someone were even suspicious of me being gay my life would be ruined. Or at least, that’s how I thought.

Lance must have been thinking the same way.

So much suffering, and what the fuck for?

Much of this came to me during my morning meditation today. Normally when I finish meditating, I always recite the Loving Kindness chant. But today, I just couldn’t get through it. Not only couldn’t I remember the verses in the right order, I was weeping as I tried to say them. And when I went through the Five Remembrances, I was struck by the last line.

“I am the owner of my Kamma, made of my Kamma, born of my Kamma, related to my Kamma, abide supported in my Kamma. Whatever Kamma I create, wholesome or unwholesome, light or dark, skillful or unskillful, to that I fall heir.”

It’s the part “… related to my Kamma, abide supported in my Kamma …” I asked my original teacher long ago what that meant. He said that being related to your Kamma literally means my relatives are manifestations of my Kamma, and the last part had to do with all my personal relationships. My friends, the jobs I had and the co-workers I have, that also is my Kamma. And as we continue to create more Kamma with our present actions, we constantly create for ourselves situations and relationships that allow us opportunity to undo past Kamma.

When you look at Kamma this way, you see how we are all in our own personal version of Bill Murray’s “Groundhog Day.” This endless cycle of rebirth plays on and on until we get it right, until we stop making Kamma and find release.

There are a lot of us in this world who behave like oxen, dragging a wagon full of woes behind us. And instead of unhitching ourselves from these carts, we spend our time throwing more shit onto someone else’s wagon. We protect our own wagons, having become fond of our woes, rather than abandoning them. I do the same thing. I want to stop. I want to help others stop.

I don’t know how to finish this post, so I’m just going to stop.

DADT protects our precious gays

Saw this video over at the blog Monkey Mind, which you should visit if you haven't already.



Just a little diversion from the normal stuff.

Was Holden Caulfield Gay?

This may strike you as an off-topic subject, the contemplation of whether JD Salinger’s most famous and talked-about character is gay. What has this got to do with Buddhism, you may ask? Frankly at first, I wasn’t sure myself. Ever since I first read “Catcher in the Rye,” I have always wondered if Holden Caulfield was gay. With Salinger’s recent death, I began to ponder this possibility anew. With these thoughts resurfacing, a moment of clarity came to me, and that was how “Catcher in the Rye” was a portrayal of the deluded mind from a very Buddhist perspective.

First I want to thank Scott over at the buddha is my dj for his post about Salinger’s death. His musings about Salinger’s work confirmed what I had sensed about the author from my own reading of “Franny and Zooey,” and that it was filled with a very Zen perspective; not like how John Updike speaks of Salinger’s prose as being open-ended and Zen-like. No, there was something else going on for me. And the same New York Time’s obituary that mention’s Updike’s comment also enlightened me to the fact Salinger practiced Zen (although one must take Salinger’s daughter’s description of her father’s practice with some skepticism).

So when I began to contemplate once again Holden’s sexuality, the additional input from the Times article and Scott’s blog post provided the prompt necessary for me to realize that Holden Caulfield is an allegory for the mind.

When many of us read “Catcher in the Rye” for the first time, we instantly identified with Holden and his railing against all the phoniness in the world. We saw the same thing, but perhaps we couldn’t quite finger it: Holden gave voice to what we were already sensing. The trouble is, Holden is a phony too. He also senses this, but is either unable to or unwilling to investigate his own phoniness, so he projects it onto everyone else. That’s not to say that Holden was wrong to say people are phony; it’s just that he wasn’t seeing the same phoniness in himself. He wanted to, he wanted closer relationships with others, he wanted intimacy, but the prospect confused him and frightened him. And like so many of us did, he distanced himself from others, labeling them as phony, as his defense against his own mind.

And that brings up the prospect of Holden being gay. My own adolescence was during the 1970s when sexual liberation was at its zenith. And yet, during that time, my confusion over my own sexuality led me to develop all kinds of irrational defenses against the very idea that I wanted to sleep with other boys. Now take that back to the time period of Holden’s, the late 1940s and early 1950s (the book was published in 1951). That context is important when considering Holden’s sexuality and how he dealt with it.

The fact that Holden is very conflicted is immediately revealed in the early chapters, particularly with his visit to the history teacher that failed him, Mr. Spencer. Holden harshly describes the teacher as mean and vindictive, and yet he feels compassion for the very sick man.

Holden’s interaction with his good-looking roomie Stradlater is interesting as well. Holden chats with Stradlater in the bathroom while the latter shaves. During the conversation, Holden nervously turns on and off a faucet; the sexual tension is palpable. And when Stradlater identifies that he’s got a date with Jane Gallagher, a girl he knows, he’s upset that Stradlater will likely have sex with Jane, a girl Stradlater hardly knows anything about – he can’t even get her name correct! Holden knows Jane well, revealing this with some insight into how the girl plays checkers.

Whether Holden is angry and jealous about the likely sexual encounter because Stradlater will get Jane and Holden won’t, or that Holden is envious that he is not sleeping with Stradlater remains ambivalent to me. It’s just not that clear because Holden remains ambivalent as well. What does become increasingly clear is how lonely Holden is as he attempts to fabricate liaisons with girls and women, which clumsily fail. His recollection of an intimate moment with Jane is more reflective of his present need for someone to show him that same level of intimate support and understanding rather than an example of any sexual desire he may have for Jane. And his fascination with the transvestite and the couple spitting on each other that he sees from his hotel room only reveal his confused and shallow understanding of sex. His later blowup with Sally may be fueled by a deluded desire to convince himself that he is in love with her, but this desperate thought mixed with all his confused emotions leads to an outburst and Sally abandoning him. His ambivalence with homosexuality is revealed with his encounter with a former schoolmate Carl Luce, as well as a later encounter with a teacher, Mr. Antolini. It is clear Holden cannot deal with the world as it is. It’s worth noting too that Mr. Antolini was, in Holden’s memory, the only person who showed any courage or kindness when a boy at school had jumped out a window after being harassed by other boys (for being perceived as gay?).

Whether Mr. Antolini was in fact making a sexual advance on Holden is irrelevant. The more important item is Holden’s homophobic reaction, which he later comes to regret.

All of these vignettes describe a deluded mind unable to see things as they really are. And isn’t that how our minds function? And isn’t it the point of the Buddha’s teaching to cut through this delusion to see truth? As a confused adolescent, I attempted sex with girls, but never carried out these situations with any success, as I was always afraid of the encounter and managed to concoct a reason to avoid it. Just as Holden loathed the idea of casual sex, believing that it ought to be with someone you truly cared for, I also wanted to seek someone I truly cared for. But I was paralyzed by a deluded mind that couldn’t shake the notion that my true desire was an abomination. Instead, I became bitter and cynical, highly critical of others, and filled with anger and resentment. Poisoned with these feelings and fabrications, I hurt people that I cared about. And, of course, this only added to my feelings of despair.

The fact that Holden’s little sister points out his misstatement of the line in the song “Coming Thro’ the Rye” as being “if a body catch a body coming through the rye,” rather than the real line, “if a body meet a body,” reveals the pivotal fear at the heart of Holden’s delusion, and that is his fear of sex. He is so completely screwed up emotionally that his deceits are so masterful that he has completely blinded himself to his own fear of intimacy on any level. His reaction is to runaway, but again, his little sister saves him. Or does she?

The novel’s ambiguous ending is to me a warning of how difficult it is to overcome our delusions once they have become part of us. Of the three taints the Buddha warns us about – greed, hatred and delusion – it is delusion that the Buddha marks as the most difficult to overcome. After all, how does a deluded mind recognize its own delusion?

Buddhism and transgendered people

Shravasti Dhammika has a really nice post at dhamma musings titled "Transgendered People and Buddhism" that I highly recommend. His blog is also in my list of blogs I follow. Along that same subject is the site Transgender and Buddhism, a Web site maintained by the International Transgender Buddhist Sangha. To be able to peruse the entire site, you must register and become a member. It has tons of great material, including some very cool videos on chanting as well as videos of a variety of Buddhist teachers commenting on many topics, not just topics specific to transgender issues.

It's unfortunate that there is prejudice and misunderstanding surrounding transgendered people, let alone that which surrounds homosexuality in general. And what really bugs me at times is when I encounter such attitudes within the gay community. Forums like these are really important for the community because there is a lot of despair that comes along with one's personal realization of his or her sexuality. It is difficult enough to come to an understanding of one's sexuality when one is gay, but the challenge of reconciliation within oneself when the inside of you and the outside of you conflict can be enormous when the world around you dismisses your conflict as mental confusion. If we really believe in the bodhisatvva vow of ending suffering for all beings, sometimes the best place to start is with a smile and an outreached hand.

His Holliness on Homo-ness

Here is another post that is part of the Great Article Swap among us Buddhist bloggers, this one from the Rev. Danny Fisher. If you're not familiar with him and his blog, you ought to be. Here it is.

First, many thanks to Richard for hosting my comments here, and to Nate for making this whole Buddhist blog swap happen.

When Richard and I got in touch, he suggested as possible topic the confusion among gay Buddhists and straight allies “by what we perceive as the Dalai Lama’s waffling on the gay issue in Buddhism.” In addition, he suggested clarification about “what is more important for gays as they approach Buddhism: personal acceptance of who we are prior to taking up Buddhism, or using Buddhism as a vehicle for self acceptance.”

I’ve examined the first issue, His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s stance on homosexuality, in some depth in a past post at my blog. Richard suggested that I rework some of what I said there and elsewhere, though, so I will begin by doing that.

In my post, I concluded that it would be difficult to characterize His Holiness as homophobic. If we’re defining a homophobe as someone who demonstrates an “irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals,” then His Holiness does not qualify: statements like those he made to the XXIII World Conference of the International Lesbian and Gay Association, as well as his willingness to meet and listen to gay Buddhists like the late Steve Peskind, demonstrate a much more open mind and heart than that, I think.

Still, other things he has said (in the context of conversations about sexual misconduct “according to the Buddhist tradition”) have been less than satisfying and even confusing. Additionally, there are things His Holiness could say that he’s not saying. In my post, I suggested that while he is right to remind us that he’s not the pope of all Buddhists, I think Peskind too is right to note that he could do more to “commit himself to helping correct harmful Buddhist teachings still on the books–including the conduct codes which can fuel homophobic behavior among Buddhist teachers and students.” While His Holiness can’t change the tradition, I suspect certain kinds of statements would be enormously influential coming from him. Imagine if he said, “According to the Buddhist tradition, homosexuality is sexual misconduct…but that’s an idea that’s a product of the time of the tradition’s origins and we should throw it away.” Call me overly optimistic, but I think that would have a pretty big ripple effect. He’s not a Buddhist pope, but, when this Dalai Lama speaks, a lot of people–a lot of Buddhists in the world–listen. With all due respect, it doesn’t quite do to say “According to the Buddhist tradition…” and leave it at that.

Holding to these Buddhist sexual ethics suggest that being a “good Buddhist” and being gay are mutually exclusive. (You can have heterosexual sex and still be a good Buddhist, but you can’t ever have homosexual sex and be a good Buddhist it seems.) And to keep saying “According to the Buddhist tradition…” with no postmodern, critical, scientific reflection is problematic in that it can (intentionally or unintentionally) enable homophobic behavior. His Holiness has frequently said that if modern scientific findings contradict our beliefs—even our most deeply held Buddhist beliefs—we must change. I would agree. On that point, the American Psychological Association has rightly noted that there have been many compelling studies about the biological and psychological origins of homosexuality and that “most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.” The sciences are speaking loudly and clearly to us, and we have a responsibility to respond.

In addition, great compassion and loving-kindness are important values in every Buddhist tradition. Is it not an extraordinarily uncompassionate, unloving, and unkind thing to (grossly or subtly) dehumanize others and (implicitly or explicitly) deny them their civil rights? I would certainly not like it if I were denied equal protection under the law. How about you?

Consider this: Civil unions offer many of the same rights and privileges of marriage, but exclusively at the state-level—they are not recognized by the United States Federal Government the way that marriages are. Furthermore, under the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 (DOMA), other U.S. states are not obliged to recognize these unions (nor are they required to recognize legal gay marriages in other states). The General Accounting Office lists over 1,100 benefits and protections for married couples–which relate to things like Social Security and VA benefits, health insurance and visitation rights, family leave, immigration law, taxes, and more–and civil unions protect only some of these rights. Because civil unions are not recognized by the federal government, this means, among many other things:

• gay couples cannot file joint-tax returns and enjoy some of the same tax protections as married couples;
• a United States citizen cannot sponsor a non-American for immigration through a civil union the way he or she could through marriage;
• if someone in a civil union receives benefits through their employer for their partner and/or children from that union, they must report the entire premium—including the share he or she paid and the share the employer paid—as income on his or her federal tax return.

Where is there love and compassion in allowing our fellow human beings to be treated in such an unjust way?

There have been powerful words and gestures of support for the gay community in the past couple of years from such Buddhists as B.P.F. Executive Director Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, Jodo Shinshu priest William Briones, Chaplain Mikel Monnett, and others. There need to be more. For my part, I am committed to serving the LGBTQ community as a straight ally. I hope more of my fellow Buddhists will join me. For resources on being an ally, I refer readers to Safe Zone For All.

Let’s talk about sex

Despite the temptation to be puerile, and goodness knows I have the capacity to be as campy as the next person (no promises here either, I might let something slip), the topic of sex is particularly important to lesbigay practitioners. The issue of right versus wrong sexual behavior – or more specifically skillful versus unskillful – is relevant to all Buddhist practitioners regardless of orientation. But it’s particularly important to gay and transgendered Buddhists because for our breeder brethren, sexuality per se is not the relevant issue. For us, however, it is.

As an aside, there has been a lot of debate, particularly within the Theravada monastic community, regarding the ordination of women. Arun at Angry Asian Buddhist has chronicled much of this, and at Sujato’s Blog, you can read more detail about the recent flap prompted by the ordination of women in Australia. The subject has also been drawing great interest in the gay Buddhist Yahoo! e-mail list Heartland. A debate like this, despite the discomfort it may create, is important to have. It provides an opportunity to not only examine the Buddha’s teachings about these things, but to evaluate how that teaching may have become staid, or even turned into a dogmatic principle that may constitute Wrong View. As the Buddha taught the Kalamas, just because something is a tradition doesn’t mean it is skillful or leads to knowing the truth.

A similar discussion about homosexuality is just as important; however, this discussion has largely been limited to the gay Buddhist community, which presents the danger that this discussion will be perceived by the larger straight community as simply being the queers trying to justify their abnormal behavior. Such a situation is paralleled in the Christian community where Christian gays are put into the rhetorical position of having to defend their sexuality against those who smugly point to biblical passages that unmistakably condemn same-sex activity, while at the same time ignore other passages that have been interpreted to be irrelevant in modern society.

It’s not a debate when all one side does is sit back and reply with the childish, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” Yet the same sophomoric response is frequently encountered by gays in the Buddhist community as well. And there is a supreme irony in all of this that seems to escape many Buddhists, particularly those in positions of authority. These individuals point to the Tipitika to justify the position that same-sex activity violates the Third Precept as if they are saying, “See there? It is written!” (Although they frequently and misleadingly point to the Vinaya, which specifically addresses behavior in the monastic community, not the lay community) We come back to the teaching of the Kalamas, when the Buddha said not to rely on something as being true simply because it is written. But somehow, this is ignored because we’re talking about the Buddha’s teachings here. How convenient that these alleged “scholars” forget that the Buddha didn’t write anything down. His teachings were oral. They were written down later, and he wasn’t around at the time to provide editing. The Buddha knew that someday, everything he said would be written down, and because not all monks hold Right View, some of those transcriptions would be erroneous.

Complicating the matter is culture and its misunderstanding. For example, many Westerners have a perception that Thai society is accepting of homosexuality. This simple view fails to appreciate that just as in American society, there are urban versus rural sensibilities. And what happens and passes as acceptable in Bangkok or Phuket isn’t necessarily acceptable in Satun or Phayao. Even in locations like Phuket, much is taken for granted by Western tourists. I can remember seeing the local Thai men staring at the European women sunbathing topless on Patong Beach, but the Thai men weren’t ogling these women. Their stares held contempt for women who were showing disrespect for the local culture by carrying on as if they were at a nude beach in a Berlin park.

I also believe that many white Buddhists fail to appreciate the influence Confucianism and Taoism has on East Asian society and thought. Recognizing the fact that homosexuals exist and not harboring any outward ill-will for them does not equate with acceptance. Some of my Chinese friends who live in Asia tell me that they would never out themselves to their parents because the consequences would be swift and severe: the thinking with their parents is, “it’s OK that I know gay people, but if my son were gay, I would abandon him in a second!” The pressure on many of these individuals to marry and sire children is tremendous; failure to do so continues to bring shame on the family.

So it should come as no surprise to Anglo American and European Buddhists that the Dalai Lama hedges in his response to questions about his view on homosexuality, or that many well-known monks from both Theravada or Mahayana traditions tell gays that it’s OK, but you should remain celibate because gay sex violates the Third Precept, speaking as if they were Christian Evangelicals who say “love the sinner but hate the sin.” Nor should we be surprised by how the fruits of kamma are brought into this discussion by those who explain being born gay is the result of kamma, with the implication that it was some wrong act in a previous life that caused this.

We ought not be surprised by any of this, but that does not mean that such views are Right View; and in the case of kamma, even if it may be Right View, that does not mean that we ought to view our current condition as a punishment.

So how should we apply the Third Precept to our lives as lesbigay people? And what did the Buddha say about sexuality? My attempts to answer these questions shall be in another blog post.

Part 2 of this post can be read at zenfant's home for dirty Dharma.

Death as a teacher

Jack Daw over at Sweep the Dust, Push the Dirt, always has great posts, but lately he’s written a couple that have really sparked my thoughts, prompting me to share my own experiences on these topics. His post regarding death really struck a chord with me. In particular, his mention of the Five Remembrances, which I know as the Five Recollections, prompted me to resume something that had been missing from my meditative practice for quite some time.

Contemplating death ought to be an important part of anyone’s Buddhist practice, but as Jack points out, it’s a subject often treated superficially, if it gets any attention at all. Yet our serious contemplation on this subject can be transformative, as indicated by this passage, taken from Ten Dhamma Talks by Sister Ayya Khema:

“If we really believe in our impending death, not just use the words, our attitude towards people and situations changes completely. We are no longer the same person then. The one we have been until now hasn’t brought us complete satisfaction, contentment and peacefulness … If we were to remember each morning that death is certain, but now have another day to live, gratitude and determination can arise to do something useful with that day.”

Let me take the risk of boring all of you with my personal journey with death. Fair warning, I’m afraid this is going to be a long post. But death has been one of my teachers for a long time, despite the fact I was, for the most part, completely oblivious to its lessons.

It was either Flag Day or Independence Day in 1968 when I awoke at home completely alone. It unnerved me a bit, as I was only 9 years old, that I could wake to an empty house like that. I don’t have a clear memory of how the news was eventually delivered to me, but I learned later that day that my father had a heart attack while he was putting the flag up on our front porch. He was in the hospital in something called intensive care. That was it, that’s all anyone told me. And for years I had no idea what a heart attack was, or that my father had a very close brush with death.

Fast forward to 1972 when I was 14. I was out riding my motorcycle around a lake where my parents were building their retirement home when I came upon a scene of people watching a rescue crew pull a body from the water. I watched and listened, gathering enough information to learn that a man was water skiing in an area of the lake that he shouldn’t have been, because when he fell, he struck his head on a stump in the water. It was the first dead body I had ever seen, yet my reaction to seeing the corpse was barely discernable. I didn’t know who this man was; but there it was – death.

I’m pretty sure it was that same summer when I begrudgingly helped my father and a brother-in-law dig trenches around what was to be our new home near the lake to bury Styrofoam around the foundation to increase the house’s energy efficiency. I hated doing this laborious work and wanted to be doing anything but that. My utter uselessness led to my father’s frustration and he angrily told me to get the hell out of there and do whatever I damn pleased. I did and went off riding my motorcycle. When I returned later in the afternoon, dad was lying in bed. Mom told me that he had angina; again, no real explanation of what that meant. But I remember quietly walking down the hall to peak into their bedroom to see him lying on the bed, resting. At that moment, I finally understood what a heart attack was.

An interesting aside: My father was born in 1910 when Halley’s Comet passed by the Earth. He died in 1986 when Halley’s Comet last passed by the Earth. It was a heart attack that killed him.
My father, I slowly learned, was a very compassionate man. We had Siamese cats, two of them. They both caught feline leukemia. When the first was so sick it was beyond help, he placed it into a large hat box, which he took out to the edge of the woods by our house where he would shoot it with my .22 rifle. But he couldn’t bear to see the animal as he shot it, so he left the lid on the box. Of course, he missed making a fatal shot. Up in the house as I watched out the window, I could hear the cat’s shrieking and reflexive thumping against the side of the hat box as my father fumbled with the rifle, a single-shot bolt action weapon, as he tried as quickly as possible to insert another bullet. When he successfully managed that, he pushed the lid off the box and fired point-blank.

When the next cat became so ill that death was inevitable, he and I together did things differently. He was a biology teacher. We went to his classroom and picked up a plastic funnel, a large wad of cotton, and a bottle of ether. We soaked the cotton with the ether, put the cotton into the funnel then placed the funnel over the cat’s head. It was so weak it just lied there. Slowly, quietly, it died.

I didn’t “come out” to my family until I was 35 years old, and the first person I told was my mother. I was quite fearful of her reaction as the Catholic Church was her life and we all know how accommodating the Catholic doctrine is of homosexuality. I had been away from home for a very long time and did not know that the priest in her parish at that time had brought a very positive message to the congregation about gays and, most importantly, AIDS. She showed me an article about the priest that mentioned another man named Mark who was living with AIDS. The writer quoted Mark as saying that he lived in a remote area and sometimes needed help with simple things like housekeeping or getting to the doctor. I decided to give Mark a call and offer my help.

I could tell Mark was suspicious of my intentions when I called him, but he agreed to meet me at his uncle’s house, as he did not want me to know where he lived yet. When we met, he revealed that he knew who I was, that he remembered me because we went to high school together. He was a year ahead of me, and we had never associated with each other, so I had no recollection of him. We became friends and I would visit him from time to time to watch movies and call him more frequently to chat.

One night I gave him a call to see how he was doing. When he answered, I could hear he was weak, his voice distant and faint. He told me he was having a bout of fever. I asked if he needed anything, but he didn’t reply. All I could hear was his wheezy, raspy breathing. I told him I was on my way over. It was about a 20 mile drive. When I arrived he appeared to feel better than he sounded on the phone. As long as I was there, he suggested, why don’t we watch a movie? During the movie the fever returned; I could hear his raspy and labored breathing. I moved from my chair to the couch where he lay, sat so he could lay against me and I put my arms around his chest. We sat like that and watched the rest of the movie.

It was very late when I left. He later told me that the following day he drove himself four hours to the V.A. hospital in Ann Arbor (he was ex-Navy, honorable discharge) where he was treated for PCP, a rare form of pneumonia that was a common killer among AIDS patients. A year later, he drove by himself from Michigan to San Francisco where he died a few months later.

At that time, I think every gay man thought about how he may die. We all, I think, wondered what we would do, how we would behave, when we received that information that many of us believed to be inevitable – that we have AIDS and were going to die. Getting the results for every HIV test I had was always a time when I had to face my mortality. And every time I wondered what I would do, how I would feel, should I learn I was positive. I’ve been fortunate when so many others have not.

And so when I came to Buddhism, my teacher impressed upon me how important recognizing the inevitability of death was, its utter certainty. And I realized how much I had already encountered death, and how I was continuing to encounter it. I just hadn’t always been paying attention.

My teacher talked about how monks would go to cemeteries in the middle of the night to meditate and contemplate death. I couldn’t do that, but interestingly, I had a book about homicide reporting – I was a police reporter for a newspaper at the time – that had all kinds of grisly photos of corpses in various states of decay. I didn’t like looking at those photos because my monkey mind always set an emotional trap for me, leading me to think about that “poor dead person,” how they “must have suffered at the hands of their killer.” But the point of meditating on death, my teacher emphasized, it to realize that our body is not who we are, it’s just a body. And the photos of decaying corpses and dismembered homicide victims in my book were not images of people – they’re just bodies.

I have a different attitude about death now than I did in the past. But there is still something very important for me to do that I haven’t done, and that is use death as an appropriate motivator. Death can be a useful tool to prompt us into action, to take the steps we know we ought to, but just haven’t gotten around to taking.

The notion that death waits for no one is a worthy one for contemplation.

Parsing kamma

I was born a white male in a middle class family with five other children in a relatively affluent community in the United States where the residents believed in an exceptional school system. I am also gay. Is all this the result of kamma? And if it is, what portions of the above could be interpreted to be the fruits of skillfulness, and what portions would be the fruits of unskillfulness?

There are a lot of different ways people talk about kamma, some skillful and many not so skillful. But even among the skillful discussions, people can appear to be saying something different, as was pointed out in a post a month ago at Dharma Folk. That’s unsurprising because kamma is a sin quo non of Buddhism. Because it is so critical to the doctrine, it invites impassioned discussion. We recognize its importance, and we want to understand how it works. Yet this essential concept to the Buddha’s doctrine cannot be so easily explained, despite the efforts of many to do so.

I am not about to try to provide a definitive description of kamma and how it works. I am, however, going to share some thoughts about how I’ve digested these divergent descriptions. And rightly or wrongly, one of my conclusions is that when you have a discussion about a concept that is critical to attaining the unbinding, and that discussion is carried out among unenlightened people, you will get some pretty bogus assertions mixed in with the insightful ones.

Let’s identify a starting point. In his book “Refuge,” Thannisaro Bikkhu writes in the section about kamma the following:

“Put briefly, it states that action is real, effective, and the result of one’s own choice. If one chooses to act skillfully and works to develop that skill, one’s actions can lead to happiness, not only on the ordinary sensory level, but also on a level that transcends all the dimensions of time and the present.”

OK, kamma is not just action, but it’s intentional action. So if I’m driving down the road and a rabbit darts out in front of my car and I run over it, killing it, there is no kamma involved, right? (except for maybe the rabbit’s) After all, I did not get into my car with the intention of killing a rabbit, right? The rabbit ran into the path of my car so suddenly I could not stop or swerve. I never saw the rabbit coming.

What if we substitute the word “child” for “rabbit”? There would be plenty of consequences facing me, including legal and financial ones, even though when I got into my car I had no intention of killing a child.

Thannisaro Bikkhu didn’t just say kamma was intentional action, he also included the descriptive word skillful. And if I am inattentive while driving, I could strike and kill a child. But if I am not making the intentional decision to remain attentive, if I am carelessly being inattentive without thought, does that mean I de facto intended to be a threat to that child?

You can see how this notion of kamma gets all tied up in knots the more we try to rationalize and explain it. And along the way, we often attach value judgments to the idea of kamma as well, going so far as to differentiate between “good kamma” and “bad kamma.”

Look at my opening paragraph. Was the fact that I was born white in a middle class family that valued education the fruits of my good kamma? Am I better off than being born among a small tribe of indigenous people in the jungle of Brazil into a family of prominence within that local society, to be given skillful instruction on how to be an effective leader of my klan? Was my kamma good and the Brazilian baby’s less good? There are too many people who would say that me being born white was the fruit of good kamma, while someone born in a black middle class family might be viewed as having to “work through” his or her kamma accumulated in past lives.

The idea that we have to work through our accumulated kamma is not a bogus one; consider the Lonaphala Sutta: The Salt Crystal as a reference (AN 3.99). But I’m wondering if this desire, particularly among Western Buddhists (at least that’s been my observation) to qualify kamma, casting it not only as the consequences of action, but as being negative or positive in nature, is actually a hindrance to anyone really grasping the Buddha’s words, as well as a hindrance to attracting others to his doctrine of truth. It appears to me to be a carryover from the Judeo-Christian hegemony. And this is particularly true when it comes to homosexuality.

In the discussion about sexuality at Dhamma Spread, the author perpetuates the idea that being homosexual is a consequence of one’s kamma; given the way society at large tends to perceive “difference,” this consequence is most often perceived as a negative one. But the author does make what I believe to be a very significant distinction: “Thus, in the end it is not about being homosexual, lesbian, or heterosexual, it is about how you deal with the mind, and how you respect and look after the mind.”

So much of the discussion about homosexuality gets trapped within a narrow and self-serving interpretation of the Third Precept. And it also gets inappropriately colored with references to the Vinaya, the monastic code. What people fail to realize is that the Vinaya addresses very specific behaviors and outlines consequences for these behaviors – some of which are homosexual in nature, and some of which are heterosexual in nature – with the goal being the maintenance of order within the sangha: it’s about action, not about nature. Outside of the Vinaya, the issue of sexuality is barely addressed at all, and when it is, the discussion is focused on whether the intention behind the action is skillful or unskillful.

So am I suffering the consequences of the kamma I’ve accumulated in past lives by being born gay?

Not any more or less so than are my straight brethren suffering the consequences of their kamma for the conditions of their birth.