This piece in London's Daily Telegraph today at first irritated me, as an expatriate Brit with a home in the La-La Land of the Lotus-Eaters. Here, it appeared, was just another xenophobic Englishman venturing abroad to deride those who dance to a different drum; and entirely mis-taking Buddhism to boot.
"It’s all about personal narratives – one man’s voyage from ignorance to enlightenment", he says. Then "No one in Los Angeles, I sense, exists for other people. How can they, sitting as they do on their yoga mats in perfect isolation from one another?"
Everything I know about the altruistic path taught by the Buddha, passed down for two and a half thousand years, and embodied today in such enlightened teachers as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, says quite the opposite: that selfless care and concern for others are the very essence, practice and result of the ever-relevant quest for awakening.
Yet, on reflection, I wonder whether the young Dr. Stanley may not have hit upon an important point for modern meditators. Mindfulness is going mainstream these days. The pioneers who brought these uplifting practices back from the East quite rightly continue to emphasize selflessness, impermanence, and that whatever we may think, "it depends". Still, for many - especially in this Western paradise - who like to think they meditate, these subtle and unsettling truths can be obscured by the cult of egotism. Meditation or yoga may become simply another "lifestyle choice", defining who we think we are - rather than helping skilfully to dismantle that tenacious self-concept.
The alchemical key, as Dr. Stanley intuits in his neo-missionary zeal, lies in the essential connection to others. Which is why each era must be careful not to popularise these precious, timeless and universal practices to such an extent that they lose their extraordinary salvific value, and become mere playthings of the prevailing culture. Yes, it's hip to sit, or to stretch. But to bring about any real, lasting alleviation of suffering - individual or collective - they have to be undertaken as community service. To benefit the whole community of beings, every last one, without discrimination. True teachers have known that, practised it and embodied it, all-ways.
So perhaps Dr. Stanley, for all his jingoistic, Anarcho-Catholic bluster, really is (as his bio suggests) a Buddha-hugging voodoo historian. Like, awesome, man.
