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Books & Media |
Buddhism in books, film, TV, and popular media |
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The Art of Being Wrong
There’s a scene in the fine and dark TV series Breaking Bad in which a villainous drug dealer, half-dead and half-blinded by a poisonous gas, stumbles down a suburban street and runs into one of his adversaries. The dealer can see just enough to recognize who it is, but he can’t see enough to realize, when he lurches off in a panic, that he’s heading straight for a large cottonwood tree. He slams into the trunk and knocks himself out cold. In the midst of that scene of tense dramatic confrontation, the resolution—a moment of classic slapstick reversal—is unavoidably funny. More » -
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What I'm Reading
The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac By Joyce Johnson Viking Press, 2012 512 pp.; $32.95 hardcover “[Kerouac] was the first one I heard chanting the Three Refuges in Sanskrit, with a voice like Frank Sinatra.” —Allen Ginsberg, in an interview in New Age Journal, April 1976. In 1941, I was newborn and oblivious to the ways that post–WWII anti-Communist fervor and the fears roiled by the existence of the atomic bomb had produced a stifling culture from which many creative people sought release. In that year, Jack Kerouac dropped out of Columbia University to join those peers and seek his authentic self as an artist. More » -
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Books in Brief Spring 2013
Five years after the publication of Breakfast with Buddha, a novel that follows Otto “Mr. Ordinary” Ringling and the Siberian Buddhist master Volya Rinpoche on a cross-country road trip, Roland Merullo returns with Lunch with Buddha (AJAR Contemporaries, 2012, $16.85, 347 pp., paper). Lunch takes Otto and Rinpoche on another road trip, this time from Washington State to North Dakota, where Otto’s sister Cecelia and Rinpoche—now married with a child—run a Buddhist retreat center. Merullo doesn’t shy away from using suffering as the building block of his characters’ growth: in Breakfast, Otto drives West to settle his parents’ affairs after their fatal car accident, while the sequel begins with the death of Otto’s wife, who has asked him to spread her ashes in Washington. More » -
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Sex, Sin, and Zen
Brad Warner is known around the Buddhist world as the proprietor of the rollicking blog Hardcore Zen (hardcorezen.blogspot.com), and a contributor to the alternative adult site Suicide Girls (suicidegirls.com), as well as the author of irreverent and very personal books about Zen practice, most recently Sex, Sin, and Zen. More » -
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Get Outta My Head
Meditating at an Indian ashram, ELIZABETH GILBERT struggles to keep it together with no help from her brain. The following morning, I arrive right on time for the 4:00 a.m. meditation session that always starts the day here. We are meant to sit for an hour in the silence, but I log the minutes as if they were miles—sixty brutal miles that I have to endure. By mile/minute fourteen, my nerves have started to go, my knees are breaking down, and I’m overcome with exasperation. Which is understandable, given that the conversations between me and my mind during meditation generally go something like this: Me: Okay, we’re going to meditate now. Let’s draw our attention to our breath and focus on the mantra. Om namah Shivaya. Om namah Shiv— Mind: I can help you out with this you know! Me: Okay, good, because I need your help. Let’s go. Om namah Shivaya. Om namah Shi - More » -
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Land of Illusions
Land of Illusions In this scene from AMY TAN's latest novel, the cynical ghost of murdered San Francisco socialite Bibi Chen tells the story of her friends’ trip to Burma. CROSSING THE BORDER into Burma, one can spot the same pretty flowers seen from the bus window in China: yellow daisies and scarlet hibiscus, lantana growing as plentifully as weeds. Nothing had changed from one country to the next, or so it appeared to my friends. More »
