Mindful Meditation
Entrance Walkway, Koto-in Zen Temple, Kyoto.
I'm not a Buddhist. I don't believe in the religion's teachings, requirements or stories. That said, I agree with many of the central precepts of Buddhism; my experience sees truth in some of the teaching, and I find the practice of Buddhism to be quite useful as I work to develop as an individual.
My first interaction with the religion came, as I'd guess is true for many Westerners, when my friend Matt suggested I read Siddartha by Herman Hesse. A freshman in college, I was supposed to be studying chemistry. Instead, I repeatedly hit Matt up for book suggestions.
Matt, a math genius who, despite taking near-graduate level mathematics courses as a freshman, instead chose to be an English Lit major, offered winner after winner: Brave New World, 1984, A Confederacy of Dunces, Slaughterhouse Five, and a full slate of books that I'd skipped or skimmed when they'd been assigned in high school. So Siddartha was Matt's doing. And I'm forever grateful.
What struck me most about Siddartha was how well it explained aspects of my own personality that I'd always felt made me different, made me foreign from other people. Siddartha's openness, his willingness to see the world from other points of view, his objective detachment from others and his refusal to make quick or permanent judgments reminded me of myself. Naturally I, the confused, ungrounded, more than a little narcissistic 18 year-old quickly focused my attention.
Today daily, directed meditation is being found to have numerous positive benefits, including improved memory and recall, reduced pain levels, extreme body control and treatment for depression:
Last week, psychologists from the University of Exeter published a study into "mindfulness-based cognitive therapy" (MBCT), finding it to be better than drugs or counselling for depression. Four months after starting, three quarters of the patients felt well enough to stop taking antidepressants.
MBCT marries Eastern meditation with Western cognitive therapy. Patients are taught the simple technique over eight sessions and then practise it at home for 30 minutes a day. Professor Willem Kuyken, whose team at the Mood Disorders Centre of the University of Exeter carried out the research, says: "Anti-depressants are widely used by people who suffer from depression and that's because they tend to work. While they're very effective in helping reduce the symptoms of depression, when people come off them they are particularly vulnerable to relapse. For many people, MBCT seems to prevent that relapse. It could be an alternative to long-term antidepressant medication."
But back in 1998, all of these potential benefits were unknown to me. Even had I known about them, the book's repeated focus on humility, personal experience, experimentation and mindfulness would have been the primary draw, even though such focus pointed out just how much work lay ahead.
Despite Siddartha's profound impact, I didn't think much about Buddhism until after college, when I stumbled across a copy of Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
Wow. What a read. Techniques described and explanations given allowing for productive meditation, all succinct and clear. Philosophy and worldview shared without the use of spiritual tales or any need for preaching. Every sentence emenating calm and wisdom. Less than 200 pages, but so powerful.
I began to practice sitting meditation and active zen awareness. Quickly, I found that I stunk (yes, all practice is good practice, but still...) and was reminded that I had a lot to learn. So challenging was the exercise that I usually gave up in a matter of minutes. I lacked patience.
That was eight years ago, and between then and now I've gone through periods where I've mediatated often, and periods, usually several months, without any practice. The lessons taught by Shunryu Suzuki, however, have kept me calm and allowed me to work through extreme, difficult personal challenges. And while I should practice more at home on my own, I now accept my own limits and supplement my lack of discipline with occassional trips to meditate with others.
So thanks to Matt and Herman Hesse and Shunryu Suzuki. My life, and hopefully the lives of those around me, are better because you took the time to share what you'd learned. Time for me to sit and to breathe.
[Image by One Man's Perspective, used under a Creative Commons license.]
A Tour of Contemporary India
Do you want to better understand the Mumbai siege? Would you like to increase your understanding of contemporary India? Have you wondered how this whole "outsourcing" thing has come to pass? Then pick up this page-turning Man Booker Prize winner.
The White Tiger is part A Confederacy of Dunces and part Life of Pi, with a touch of Machiavelli's The Prince and a little bit of Atlas Shrugged thrown in for good measure.
Our tale is dictated and recorded by the protagonist, Balram Halwai. Given no name but "boy" because his family worked too hard to think up a real name, Balram is the prototypical Indian entrepreneur.
Upon hearing on the radio that Mr. Jiabao, the Premier of China, will be visiting India to learn about the sub-continent's tremendous entrepreneurial spirit, Balram decides that, for the Premier's sake, he must intervene. Knowing that the official guides will give China's Premier a false account of what is happening in India, Balram takes it upon himself to record his own life story as a means toward understanding the true India.
Told as a collection of spoken recordings, made each night for a week in the wee hours of the morning and addressed directly to Mr. Jiabao, our Bangalore entrepreneur guides the reader, along with the Premier, through modern India as experienced by someone who started out among the poorest of the poor and wound up a wealthy man.
Inspired wit and ignorance, lust and greed, corruption and murder, reason and pride, cunning and madness, luck and careful planning. All play a role in this allegorical work.
North Korea's Gulags
An article in today's Washington Post tells the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, a man who was born in a North Korean prison camp but escaped at age 26 and now lives in South Korea.
Of all the places to be born in this world, North Korea is one of the worst.
The U.S. government and human rights groups estimate that 150,000 to 200,000 people are now being held in the North's prison camps. Many of the camps can be seen in satellite images, but North Korea denies their existence.
Shin is the author of a grimly extraordinary book, Escape to the Outside World.
It is illustrated with simple line drawings of his mother's hanging, the amputation of his finger, his torture by fire. There are black-and-white photographs of his scars, as well as drawings and a satellite photo of Camp No. 14. It is located in Kaechon, about 55 miles north of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.
The book grew out of a diary he kept in the Seoul hospital while he was recovering from the nightmares and screaming bouts that were part of his adjustment.
It begins with the story of his birth in Camp No. 14 to parents whose union was arranged by prison guards. As a reward for excellent work as a mechanic, his father was given the woman who became Shin's mother. Shin lived with her until he was 12, when he was taken away to work with other children.
In the book, Shin describes the "common and almost routine" savagery of the camp: the rape of his cousin by prison guards and the beating to death of a young girl found with five grains of unauthorized wheat in her pocket. He once found three kernels of corn in a pile of cow dung, he writes. He picked them out, cleaned them off on his sleeve and ate them. "As miserable as it may seem, that was my lucky day," he writes.
Reports by American news suggest that the DMZ is a key fascet of daily S. Korean life, much as The Bomb was part of American awareness in the sixties. Not so.
Shin also struggles to understand why prosperous Koreans in the South seem so uninterested in and unmoved by the suffering of tens of thousands of fellow Koreans living in torment in the North's prisons.
"I don't want to be critical of this country, but I would say that out of the total population of South Korea, only .001 percent has any real understanding of or interest in North Korea," Shin said. "Only a few decades ago, the South Koreans had their own human rights issues. But rapid growth and prosperity has made them forget."
Shin may overstate the South's lack of concern about human rights in the North, but he has a point.
When South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was elected last year, only 3 percent of voters named North Korea as a primary concern. They were overwhelmingly interested in economic growth and higher salaries.
South Koreans want reunification with the North, but not right away, polls show. They have seen the cost and messiness of German unification. They worry about political collapse in the impoverished North and are afraid that dealing with it would lower their living standards, according to government officials and independent analysts.
The reasoning for such lack of concern by the South makes sense, but that is little consolation for Shin.
He is unemployed and worries about how to pay his $300-a-month rent. His defector stipend of $800 a month, which he had received from the South Korean government since arriving in Seoul 2 1/2 years ago, ended in August.
Making money. Saving money. Dating. Loving another human being. These are all strange concepts that Shin has struggled -- and largely failed -- to understand.
"I never heard the word 'love' in the camp," he said. "I want to have a girlfriend, but I don't know how to get one. Two months ago, I found myself without any money. It suddenly occurred to me that I had to go out and support myself."
Unfortunately, the book has not been a success and no English translation is planned. To learn more about North Korea and its prison camps, I highly recommend reading Aquariums of Pyongyang and Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty. The former is the memoir of a man who lived for ten years in a gulag before escaping. The latter is a detailed, readable history of North Korea and the Kim Dynasty.
Hopefully the atrocities being committed in North Korea will begin to enter the awareness of the rest of the world. Until that happens, those of us unlucky enough to be born in North Korea will be born into slavery. Without outside aid, those people will never have a chance.
[Image by Shepard Fairey]