Buddha of Bamiyan
January 2006
Markets of Enlightenment
Last summer in Oaxaca, I traveled to Tlacolula, a market town whose roots go back some 850 years when Zapotec people called it Guichiibaa, the village at the border of Heaven. The market is well known for its varieties of mescal (there’s even one called “Biagra”); and, on Sundays, packed stalls entice you with pumpkin flour quesadillas, brilliantly colored, hand-woven huipiles, velvet and sisal sombreros, miniature Zapatista dolls, religious icons and votives of Guadalupe, Frida Kahlo, and the curandera Maria Sabina. The abundance of crafts and commerce masks the poverty of Mexico’s second poorest state, but its rhythm and rituals of exchange are slow-paced and friendly, the antithesis of North American malls, which, by contrast, seem either robotically soulless or frenzied with rapacious impatience.
Tlacolula is also renowned for its Chapel, resplendent with gold-leafed carvings, angels, and Christian saints. These glistening icons show graphic depictions of faith: decapitated martyrs holding their severed heads, a bloodied Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows, images of violence, sorrow and spiritual warfare. In the doorway, a beggar or limosnero, half-blind and crippled, shouted without restraint whenever the cameras of tourists flashed over the prayers of the faithful. Devotion to the Chapel’s holy icons and images is expressed with animistic intensity. I watched an Indian woman weep over a horizontal vitrine covering a life-size sculpture of the deposed body of Christ. She conversed through the glass, her hand moving along the surface as if it were the very water of life or the tomb of her only son.
I was reminded how religions evoke such fervor around images, even those traditions that prohibit their worship. Indeed, that very prohibition can turn fanatical in its execution. In March 2001, the Taliban used tanks and dynamite to destroy Afghanistan’s colossal Bamiyan Buddhas. Once covered in gold and jewels, these 1500-year old twin statues, the largest standing Buddhas in the world, were carved into a mountain of red sandstone that overlooked the caravans, merchants, and monks who moved along the Silk Road linking Asia to the West. Their destruction presaged the events of 9/11, when the collision of religion and politics exploded in a vicious expression of intolerance and inhumanity.
Bombing the two Buddhas and twin Trade Towers were also symbolic acts, expressing a fanatic iconoclasm and fundamentalist zeal against free markets and mammon. It was as if, by destroying these towering images, the Taliban and the terrorists thought they could eradicate the ideas and belief systems they embody. Intolerance is one poison of our time; spiritual materialism — a seductive brew of almighty dollars, dogma and the Divine — is another.
Case in point: The current issue of the Buddhist review Tricycle features a provocative interview with Mu Soeng, co-director of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Vermont. This Indian-born scholar warns that in America, “Buddhism is in danger of becoming another consumer item.” His most severe criticism is directed at Dharma centers and marketing mystics who get trapped in the celebrity game by promoting themselves, their books, and teachings to gain attention and build a following in ever-increasing numbers. This, he believes, is antithetical to the Buddha’s path of liberation. While Americans, he adds, have brought a deep understanding of psychology, physics, and cognitive science to Buddhist practice, “we may not have paid sufficient attention to our personal greed, hatred, and delusion.” Mu Soeng reminds us that after Buddha’s enlightenment, he did not live in a palace or ashram full of fawning disciples; rather, he chose a path of “psychological homelessness,” attached neither to building a cultish following nor his own material advancement.
Can “liberation,” “awakening” and “enlightenment” be bought and sold? That is a question worth pondering, and a number of articles in our current issue take more than a poke around the edges. Mark Williams interviews Naqshbandi Sufi Llewelyn Vaughan-Lee, a Marin sheik who questions the “spiritual materialism” of some New Age rhetoric and its hype and hyper-focus on self-development, particularly the kind that neglects our connection and responsibility to society and the planet. That idea is echoed in Lisa Maria’s column on Green Yoga. Troubled by an increasingly commercialized yoga industry, she introduces the work of a group of eco-conscious yogis as an antidote.
Last summer, Common Ground co-sponsored a conference at UC Berkeley on Spiritual Activism. There, Rabbi Michael Lerner addressed the question of America’s spiritual crisis, an alienation he believes is bred in a workplace where profit, power, and material success eclipse all sense of compassion and meaning in our lives. Rabbi Lerner is calling for a New Bottom Line for America, one where corporations and institutions are measured for how they foster ethical and ecological sensitivity and how well they advance kindness, nonviolence and peace. Traci Hukill profiles one local candidate: St. Anthony’s Farm outside Petaluma, a place where recovering alcoholics and addicts staff an organic dairy that produces 1800 gallons of milk a day distributed by Clover Stornetta. The dairy is an offshoot of St. Anthony’s Foundation in San Francisco, begun in 1950 by a Franciscan friar who dedicated himself to solving problems of poverty and homelessness in his own neighborhood.
And then there is the Journey’s piece by Joanne Cowan, a Colorado Quaker arrested for bearing witness at Fort Benning’s notorious School of the Americas and protesting the Bush administration’s policy of torture in the war on terror. Her sacrifice and moral courage remind us that an authentic spiritual path, what Quakers call “seeking clearness,” involves more than a quest for personal happiness and material gain.
Markets, whether in Mexican pueblos, along the ancient Silk Road, Madison Avenue or the Internet are transmission points for ideas and goods. And in our time, it is instructive to see how dependent they are on magical thinking. It is the essence of branding, advertising, salesmanship and spin. Calvin Klein can make Truth a male underarm deodorant; Daimler can turn a disappearing and endangered jungle cat into an automotive status symbol — the Jaguar. In the Mayan world, these cats ruled the Underworld, and their pelts symbolized the Divine right of Kings; in ours, the brand still serves fat cats and the powerful (including spin doctor Karl Rove).
Surely the path to enlightenment looks beyond such magical thinking and attachments to power. Beyond inwardness and self-realization, it should lead us ever deeper into human life, ever deeper into compassion and engagement.
— Carl Nagin
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