Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day
How to submit material to the Highlights
#3858 -
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Tonight, April 7,
is the showing of "The Buddha" on PBS.
This article is an introduction to Buddhism for those who have no
familiarity with it, and also for anyone who wants to see
Buddhism through fresh eyes. The article is from
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/columnists/ellen_gray/20100407_Ellen_Gray___Buddha__explores_religion___a_monk_has_advice_for_Tiger.html
Ellen Gray:
'Buddha' explores religion & a monk has advice for Tiger
By Ellen Gray
Philadelphia Daily News
Daily News TV Critic
THE BUDDHA. 9 tonight, Channel 12.
IF ALL YOU know about
Buddhism is that Tiger Woods and Richard Gere both belong and
that the Dalai Lama appears to be one of the world's more jovial
religious leaders, then tonight's PBS documentary, "The
Buddha," might be a step on a path to further enlightenment.
At the very least, it's a
two-hour respite from the sound-bite culture that in January
brought us Brit Hume, on Fox News, advising golfer Woods to look
to Christianity for redemption and forgiveness because Buddhism
didn't offer that.
Filmmaker David Grubin's
"The Buddha" isn't trying to win hearts or minds or
stake out a position on either Tiger or
Narrated by actor Gere
and by actress Blair Brown, "The Buddha" at times plays
like a fairy tale - or a Bible story - with a mother's prophetic
dream, a father's efforts to control his son's destiny and the
son's flight, all leading to a revelation under a fig tree.
"We try to set his
life in its historical context, but it's so long ago that we
don't know what he really did," Grubin told reporters in
January during a PBS press conference in Pasadena, Calif.
"But what I realized is what he really did doesn't really
matter. What matters is the story and the meaning of that story
and the message of hope that the story carries."
The filmmaker, who
directed and produced "The Jewish Americans" for PBS in
2008, isn't a Buddhist, and though he'd read Herman Hesse's
"Siddhartha" many years ago, "I really forgot most
of it," he said.
"I've always been
interested in psychology in my films. I think that's probably one
thing that you can see, from 'The Secret Life of the Brain' to
'LBJ' to 'Napoleon,' " he said.
"The Buddha, you
know, was really the first psychologist. He really thought about
the human mind, the way . . . our thoughts buzz and buzz and buzz
and what that all means and what to do about finding a way to be
more in touch with our lives and ourselves. He was searching for
a kind of serenity.
"As [poet] W.S.
Merwin said, he was trying to understand suffering in the world.
And he came up with some ideas about that, which I wanted to
explore and . . . I think I'm reaching the age where I'm looking
for maybe a deeper kind of wisdom than you could find in the film
about LBJ."
So what kind of wisdom
might a non-Buddhist take away from "The Buddha"?
"Well, Freud used to
say, you know, that the best he could do for someone was to take
them from a state of neurotic misery and return them to one of
common unhappiness. And the Buddha taught that common unhappiness
was actually workable," Dr. Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist and
Buddhist and one of the experts quoted in Grubin's film, told
reporters.
"Buddha, like Freud,
was a realist. He was intent on observing experience just for
what it was and not adding or subtracting anything from it. So in
order to cultivate that ability to be with things just as they
are, he encouraged certain qualities of mind, similarly,
actually, to the way that Freud taught psychoanalysts to pay
attention.
"Freud's words were,
'You should give impartial attention to everything there is to
observe. Suspend judgment, and give impartial attention to
everything there is to observe.' And the Buddha, in different
words, taught the same thing. He taught people how not to push
away experience that they didn't like with aversion and how not
to hold on to experience that they did like out of pleasure. So
he taught what became known as balance of mind or equanimity,
which we would also call patience."
As for that tomcat Tiger,
the Venerable Metteyya Sakyaputta, a young monk from
"I think . . . he
was trying to help," he said. "His intention is to help
Tiger Woods to become a better person. But . . . if we would ask
the same question to Buddha, what would he say?"
Buddha, the monk said,
had always advised those attracted to his teachings to first look
to their own traditions for answers.
"We are all human
beings. We're trying to develop ourself, grow up. We're not
perfected, and Tiger Woods is not an exception as well. And I
think first what he should do is probably he could look deeper.
Even in Buddhist tradition, we have different ways to deal with
it. Definitely there is no redemption, but the Buddhist point of
view is that forgiveness is not the answer."
A person who's forgiven,
he said, might feel, " 'Oh, I'm free of this burden because
God' - or [a] certain entity - 'has given me forgiveness.' But he
has not really dealt with those mental patterns, his mental
habits, addictions that brought him to there. So Buddhist wisdom
is to deal with that. And if he grows out of that, he'll be
definitely a changed person." *
Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.