Facing a white wall

Believe it or not, a few years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle's Religious Affairs Editor was a journalist named Don Lattin. He's no longer there, I understand, but you can find his articles either on his own website http://www.donlattin.com/ or at http://www.sfgate.com/. Oh, and Mr Lattin is Jewish. (While we're on the subject of people's names, some years ago there was a famous animal psychologist, as he called himself, whose name was James Fox. Would you trust Dr Fox with Freudian therapy for your chickens?)

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Don Lattin was good. He would dare to say in print this about Dalai Lama's new book:

The beloved and bespectacled Tibetan also has a new book, which says more or less the same thing as his last book, and the one before that.

I recently recalled some Don Lattin articles I had read, while observing, what one could call, Eastern influenced affectations of a few people around me. Yoga is big these days, Meditation (with a capital 'M') is big, talking mystical gibberish, influenced by Eastern religions and translated into Western therapeutic lingo ('psychobabble'), is big, and people don't seem any happier than before. Whatcha gonna do?! (Watch out, cognitive behavioral therapy is coming, and even FORBES magazine has noticed it recently! A subject for another post.)

I recently asked an Indian (from India) friend why I wasn't seeing any Indians (who are numerous around here) in my yoga class. I was expecting some interesting insights, like "oh, that's nothing but old folklore", or something similar, but she was surprised to hear that, and told me that her middle class mother in India practiced yoga. But she, a modern educated young woman, and her husband in a traditional arranged marriage, living and raising a family here in the U.S., did not. At the end of our conversation, I learned little about yoga, but quite a bit about Bollywood and its stars.

Be that as it may, Don Lattin once surveyed the Buddhist practices in his region of the San Francisco Bay Area. Here's what he wrote:

Like most converts, Western Buddhist practitioners take their religion seriously, devoting countless hours, weeks or months to vigorous meditation regimes. They try to train the mind to empty itself of the clutter and clatter of ordinary consciousness.

[...]

Most Asian American Buddhists (and Buddhists in Asia) seem perfectly content to let their monks do the hard work of this moral and spiritual regimen.

Rather than sitting cross-legged on the floor all day, suffering through hours of painful knees and aching backs, Buddhists who are born Buddhist are more likely to make offerings at the temple, light some incense and spend a few minutes praying for good luck.

[...]

My suggestion to those seeking an understanding of the two Buddhisms in America is to go experience a Sunday afternoon on the 1900 block of Russell Street in Berkeley. At 1911 Russell St., you will find scores of Thai immigrants crowding into the backyard of Temple Mongkolratanaram for a noontime feast of Thai food and boisterous conversation.

Above the din, in an upstairs flat converted into a makeshift temple, you may find a Thai family presenting the monks with a plastic laundry basket filled with bottles of Calistoga fruit juice, rolls of paper towels and other household supplies.

Just a few doors up the street, at 1929 Russell St., you may find a few dozen veterans of the spiritual counterculture filing into the rustic elegance of a traditional Japanese meditation hall. Once inside the zendo of the Berkeley Zen Center, you may see these "serious" Buddhists sitting atop round black cushions, backs straight, facing a white wall.