I am always looking for non-scenery-based challenges or curiosities that dovetail with a peripatetic lifestyle. One of the little projects that I have wanted to work on is to visit local churches to see what I could learn.
Although some atheists are hostile to religion I appreciate its role in history and its ability to inspire people with transcendental and aesthetic imagery, despite the silliness of their doctrines. Besides, the standard atheist is a bit of a hypocrite about his vaunted Unbelief. Once, many years ago, I even had a "religious experience" at a Unitarian Church of all places. Actually it was a nostalgic/aesthetic experience, but that's beside the point.
This spring the Tibet protests were in the news. On The Buddha's birthday the local Buddhists welcomed the public to a commemoration. It was time to stop procrastinating. I attended their ceremony.
I've done some homework on Buddhism but never really found a classic of the Buddhist oeuvre. This group was Zen Buddhist and the Japan-ness of the experience burst my bubble in the first two minutes. Perhaps I went there expecting a Seven Years in Tibet experience.
Their sanctuary was a garden that was pleasing to the senses and helped to put people in a calm and contemplative mood. It had been built on a very low budget.
They started the ceremony with black-robed officials promenading in with a certain amount of dignity and solemnity, but far inferior to what I have seen elsewhere. Nobody beats the Catholics at this game.
They all wore the same black robes; only their footwear was individualistic, so naturally that is what I paid attention to. I expected them to all be wearing Birkenstock sandals.
As they promenaded by me I cast furtive glances downward, through my secret agent sunglasses. The first pair of Buddhist feet were wearing pink versions of those stupid little plastic shoes with the holes in them. But at least they weren't Birkenstocks. Then the rest of them came in. One guy had Merrell hiking boots. That pleased me so much that I started to relax and enjoy the rest of the ceremony.
They moved on to a Hymn of Natural Harmony. Once again I squirmed. Yea, yea, baby arctic seals, baby endangered grizzly bears, all animals cute and cuddly. But once again they surprised me: some of the critters on their list were positively uncuddly and unphotogenic.
Was it possible that these Buddhists, despite my dismissive hippie-dippie stereotypes, were rational adults with common sense?
Then we marched in a circle, chanting a hymn in Japanese. At first I felt embarrassed, like we were a community playhouse group putting on an amateur performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado.
But then again, what difference did it make whether anyone there understood Japanese or not. Medieval Catholic peasants were devout even though they didn't understand the Latin Mass. Then the Protestants came along with their mighty idea that every shopkeeper and farmer should own his own Bible written in his own language. Real progress, they said.
And what is the result 500 years later? In the most militarily powerful country on earth, mostly Protestant, people believe the earth is 6000 years old and that they're going to be Raptured from Israel in a couple years. So much for teaching peasants to read.
Anyway, in the Buddhist ceremony the words of that chant were subtitled in English. Common sense, once again.
