The Buddhist video game breaks conventions

The Buddhist video game

In nearly all aspects of our lives, we are taught that success comes through a linear progression. You “level up” in life, career, relationships, physical condition, and in many other ways. This is reinforced through entertainment such as video games, novels, and movies, where someone starts off “weak” and gets stronger as time progresses, challenges are overcome, and goals accomplished. In many cases, there is a final “enemy” to vanquish; an anti-hero.

A recent project from NYU students Bona Kim and James Borda is a video game called “The Buddhist“, and it seeks to challenge the very concept of linear progression by presenting the idea of non-attachment in a medium that is traditionally very linear.

Through “The Buddhist” we hope our audience gains some awakening. By confronting them with a “game” in which any attempt to control the story results in failure, we hope our audience will be brought into the present moment – to enjoy the here and now, free of the anxious search for happiness in some other place and time.

The game was available to play at the ITP Winter Show, NYU’s annual showing of its Interactive Telecommunications Program student projects.

The goal of the game is to observe, reflect, and be in the present moment. Any attempt to control the on-screen character or cause something to happen other than what is currently being displayed on the screen results in “game over”. As you succeed in doing nothing, the on-screen character will go to different environments to meditate. The scenery is pleasing to observe and this is the goal; to observe and enjoy.

Even though it seems silly, it’s a concept that can cause insightful thinking; why do we need to control this character? What kind of feedback are we hoping for by pushing levers and buttons? How is this somehow more appealing than sitting back, observing, and reflecting?

It’s a fascinating art project, and one that causes us to think—by any measure, that’s a success.

A Buddhist Thanksgiving

This year, I spent part of the day at Miao Fa Chan Temple, where they had a vegetarian Thanksgiving lunch. No turkey, but plenty of hot pots, pumpkin pie, and metta. Everyone who came pitched in, bringing and/or cooking food, setting up the eating area, taking out the garbage, washing dishes, and even cleaning toilets. It was definitely a nice way to spend Thanksgiving. Even though I hardly knew anyone there, I felt as if I were among old friends.

After the meal, Ajahn Fa Thai made a huge pot of soup to take down to one of the local homeless shelters for all the people who have nowhere to go and nobody to spend the day with. That simple gesture really touched me for some reason, maybe because so few of us would think to do something like that, being so caught up in our own, cloistered lives (myself included). Sometimes it’s the simplest acts of kindness that can inspire the deepest reverence.

My 3-day vipassana retreat experience at Wat Atam

I spent this past weekend at Wat Atammayantaram (Wat Atam for short) in Woodinville, WA, for a meditation retreat that was led by Ajahn Sudanto from the Pacific Hermitage (a branch monastery of Abhayagiri) in White Salmon, WA. While short relatively as far as retreats go, it was exactly what I needed. It’s been a few years since I’ve attended a meditation retreat at a Thai Buddhist monastery, and I forgot how much I enjoy spending time at monasteries and emulating the monastic life, even if for just a few days.

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Best defense? Don’t be there

“What’s the best defense? Don’t be there.” It’s a mantra my martial arts teacher repeats frequently. We practice side steps combined with soft blocks over and over until the movements are reflexive. When someone kicks or punches, you have three options: get hit (OUCH), use a hard block (bam!), or get out of the way. You use the hard block when you’re too slow to move. You get hit when you’re too slow to throw a hard block.

Life’s the same way. Maybe they’re not punching you, but you get attacked a lot. Maybe it’s an abusive comment. Maybe it’s a bold lie, or just someone being disingenuous. Maybe it’s an attack on a relationship, your career, or your identity. You get to choose how you respond.

When you’re mindful and in control of yourself, you can move out of the way. Then you can decide how best to respond to defuse the attack. If you don’t have the habit of moving established, maybe you deflect it with sarcasm (a verbal “hard block”). If you don’t move at all, you get hit with the full weight of it and it cripples you.

It’s like this every time you respond to (or moderate!) a discussion or blog post, too. How you move in response to the energy will define everything about your interaction with a community. Do you have the reflex established to move, or does every blow land, making you angry? Every time you’re attacked is a new opportunity to change your habits.

New community tools for NewBuddhist

If you’re a NewBuddhist regular, you may have noticed some big layout changes today. This is part of our overall update to make NewBuddhist more engaging, more fun, and more welcoming to new members.

NewBuddhist badgesA few weeks ago we silently rolled out Badges. Badges are a way to show off your level of participation in your user profile.

The theory goes like this: The more you participate in the community, the more ultimately rewarding it is for you and for the rest of the community. Badges are a great way to give community members a “roadmap” of how to best participate in this community. If there’s a badge for something, chances are you’re going to find it a rewarding experience to earn it. We will have badges for things like sharing your photography, being helpful, and introducing yourself. Continue reading

RV Living – A step toward a minimalist lifestyle

Finding Buddha on the roadRVs should truly get some thought, if you want to take steps to minimizing your attachments to superficial and material things—and to some degree, people—especially if you want, but aren’t quite ready, to sell the homestead and go camp on a beach with a knapsack on a stick.
While writing this I am attempting to stay focused on the things I anticipate will be helpful in assisting me and my son in learning and practicing Buddhism. There is much more to living in an RV than just simply getting one and driving off to the nearest mountain to forever live a peaceful, lackadaisical, carefree life, however. Think of it more as a large step in that direction. Disclaimer: I do not currently nor have I ever lived in an RV, but I have spent a couple of months now researching the idea. I see many aspects that could coincide with what I know about Buddhism. Continue reading

Jiro Dreams of Sushi and the art of perfecting your craft

Jiro Dreams of Sushi reviewI don’t know if Jiro Ono is a Buddhist. I don’t know if Jiro is really even a very nice person. What I do know, after watching a movie about him, is that Jiro has attained a level of skill in his craft that most humans only dream of.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a documentary about a man and his sushi restaurant in Tokyo, Japan. Jiro, at the time of filming, was 85 years old. Every day except Sunday, he gets up and goes into work at Sukiyabashi Jiro. There, along with his son Yoshikazu and a handful of apprentices, he serves up what many consider the best sushi on the entire planet.

Sukiyabashi Jiro is in a subway station. It’s a tiny, 10-seat restaurant. It costs an exorbitant amount of money to eat there. There is no menu. There are no appetizers. You put your name on a waiting list that exceeds a month, you pay almost $400, and you eat what Jiro puts in front of you while he watches—and only then will you experience the highest state of sushi ever created.

Much of the film focuses on Jiro and his relentless pursuit of perfection. Every single piece of sushi he serves up is an attempt to make it better than the last. You can see, then, that being an apprentice under a man who is never satisfied would probably be extremely challenging.

Throughout the film, we see Jiro standing, sternly glaring at his apprentices, his son, or his customers (he watches his customers eat, which many find off-putting). He appears lost in contemplation; studying his customer’s faces as they eat, watching the body language of his apprentices, making sure his son is doing everything correctly. He is absolutely, at all times, focused on one thing and one thing only: the sushi.

There are lessons to be learned from Jiro. Finding a craft that you’re passionate about and then uncompromisingly pursuing it is admirable. Is sushi important? It doesn’t matter. Does Jiro’s obsession with perfection affect his personal relationships? It doesn’t matter. Is Jiro loved? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It doesn’t seem to matter.

Despite the titular character and the focus on Jiro, however, the movie seems to be more about his son, Yoshikazu. Here is a man who is in his 50s, and for his entire life he has been working under his father’s strict and uncompromising control. He didn’t go to college. No wife or children were mentioned. We see a long scene in which Yoshikazu is talking to the filmmakers as he methodically roasts sheets of nori, the seaweed used to wrap sushi rolls. During the entire scene, he talks about doing the same thing over and over again, about learning something so thoroughly that it becomes your nature, and about finding peace with this type of lifestyle. During the entire monologue, the camera is focused on Yoshikazu’s hands. He never loses a beat, he never falters—it’s as if he is a robot, perfectly programmed for this one simple task.

Yoshikazu seems extremely happy in his life. He goes to the market, he forges friendships with fish and rice experts, and yet he proudly boasts of his father’s work, of his father’s awards, of his father’s achievements.

Jiro admits to being a rather bad father. Throughout his sons’ childhood, he was not present, since he was always at the restaurant. He does show moments of tenderness, though, even as he claims he is extra strict with Yoshikazu and his other son Takashi. Takashi opted to move out of his father’s business and open his own sushi restaurant (with his father’s blessing). However, when Takashi moved out, Jiro told him “You have no home to return to.” In this way, Jiro was making sure Takashi understood that he absolutely had to succeed. Failure was not an option.

Yoshikazu says, throughout the film, that he will never be as good as his father. A prominent food reviewer says, “Yoshikazu could be twice as good as his father and only then will they say he is as good as Jiro. He won’t have it easy.”

Yoshikazu and the apprentices (the ones that make it for more than a day or two, anyway) are paragons of patience and dedication. There is a scene in which one of the apprentices talks about spending four years working on perfecting tamagoyaki (egg sushi). Every day, for four years, he would make tamagoyaki and have Jiro tell him what was wrong with it, how bad it was, and to do it again. Finally, one day, Jiro tasted the tamagoyaki, said, “It’s good. That’s how it should be done.”

The apprentice broke down in tears. He had achieved a small bit of enlightenment.

One glaring omission from this film is any mention at all of Takashi and Yoshikazu’s mother—presumably Jiro’s wife. Jiro does talk about his parents and childhood a bit (it was bleak), but he never mentions anything about his love life. It’s as if Takashi and Yoshikazu were hatched from eggs and specifically groomed for sushi. They may as well have been born in the restaurant.

This movie makes you think about what you do. It makes you want to buckle down and practice your craft. It’s a shining example of what passion and focus can achieve, but there are also lessons about life and love to be had.

Perhaps only through this level of determination and mindfulness can perfection be achieved. Jiro is a man who was ready and willing to make whatever sacrifices were necessary to achieve perfection. Whether you like him or not is irrelevant. Perhaps that’s what we’re meant to take from this.

Sacred Mountain Monastery in Warren, Michigan

A  few years ago, I was as shocked as anybody when a Vietnamese sangha bought an old Salvation Army building and turned it into a Buddhist Monastery in extremely blue-collar Warren, Michigan. Warren is a factory town, known mostly for automotive plants and high-tech manufacturing and engineering. It’s a very, well… “white” town. The area where this monastery went up is in south Warren, which is a working-class area with liquor stores, check cashing shops, and a few bars. It was like a bloom of flowers in the desert, both literally and figuratively (they planted colorful flowers everywhere, and if you know Vietnamese Buddhists, you know they love their flowers!)

Here’s a picture of the statue in front of the chùa (temple):

Chùa Linh Son temple in Warren, Michigan

Right Speech is difficult, but so necessary

For the last year, my intention has been to focus on a specific spoke in the wheel of the eightfold path—Right Speech. Almost immediately after I set this intention, I experienced big challenges and big failures. The lessons learned were painful but utterly necessary to truly take Right Speech to another level. Through the process it has been easy to see how the spokes are related to one another—Right Intention and Right Speech are intertwined at every level.
Dhamma Wheel

My first lesson came in the form of a deep intuition of a long friendship. It was clear to me that the stories some friends had of me were not how I saw myself or my current story. I felt this disconnected undercurrent as I struggled in my new and stronger self, one that left any trace of victim aside. The new self was one that others could not recognize, and one that showed significant growing pains through repeated mistakes. Continue reading

Tolerant Christians. They do exist.

First Christian Church of OrangeA few years back I got invited to a wedding in California. A very good friend of mine was marrying his love—who just so happened to be a pastor at a Christian Church.

I went to their wedding, which was small, touching, and beautiful. While I was there I met some of their friends and I learned a lot about their church—the First Christian Church of Orange.

One thing that struck me immediately was that Olivia, the bride, went out of her way to make sure that she respected and understood my Buddhist beliefs, and wanted to make sure that I was comfortable at her Christian wedding—something no Christian in my experience had ever done for me. I was quick to ensure my friend and his bride-to-be that there wouldn’t be any issues. I was totally awestruck at the fact that they even considered my feelings in the matter. It was very humbling and a striking turn of tables, as generally Buddhists in America have to make sure to explain or apologize to their Christian friends and ensure their comfort in awkward situations like weddings and funerals.

I tell you that anecdote to set the stage for the kind of church that Olivia presides over. Over the time I spent in Orange with the newlyweds, I came to have a great deal of respect for their church. They were openly tolerant of everyone, regardless of race, background, and (most strikingly) sexual orientation. They had many openly gay congregants.

The church doesn’t just pay lip service to being “open”, either. In getting to know my friend’s new wife, she used her convictions and biblical knowledge to explain exactly why her church believes that Jesus Christ was, above all else, a tolerant and loving man. Their mission was only to share Christ’s love of everyone.

One of the friends I met while in Orange was Michelle. She is also a member of the church. She writes a blog about being a single Christian mom and today’s post, on Valentine’s Day, really struck me as capturing the spirit of the church.

The post is called “Be Loud in Love“. Reading it brought me back to my trip to Orange and was a refreshing reminder, in a world that is filled with news of hatred, violence, and intolerance, there are indeed loving and kind Christians out there. This particular passage struck me:

There are some Christians who “love the sinner, hate the sin.” This seems to me like a backhanded insult, that the Christian does not love the whole person, but instead they love who they, the Christian, want the ”sinner” to be. You can’t only love someone’s potential, you have to love their reality, too. That’s like saying “I love the thin person inside of you.” This idea is not love, it is simply tolerance.

I know a lot of Buddhists have, if not outright hostility, a general distaste for Christianity—in a pushy Christian society like America, it’s not hard to see why. Just try to remember our own philosophy of loving kindness and let’s try to practice a little tolerance of our own.

Must be the full moon

I’m not exactly sure what has crawled up everyone’s ass lately, but I’ll say this:

NewBuddhist is a light-hearted community. We laugh. We don’t take things too seriously. We are here for people who are reaching out to Buddhism to answer some question or fill some gap in their lives. We have compassion for those who are new to Buddhism. We are not jerks.

If you have trouble with taking things far too seriously, or you are by nature an angry person, or it bothers you when people are “wrong on the internet”, or if you feel the need to be correct all the time, NewBuddhist is probably not a great place for you. There are, I’m certain, other Buddhism-centric communities that appeal to advanced practitioners or embrace the drama.

But drama? NewBuddhist ain’t it. Lincoln and I (the two guys who run this site) are just normal, happy dudes. We chill. We drink bourbon once in a while. We joke. We laugh. And we believe, with all our hearts, that practicing lovingkindness and compassion in an online space is entirely possible, appropriate, and so very, very modern.

A fellow student is attacked

Last night, a fellow student at my dojo told a story. It’s rare for Sifu to invite a student to speak at length during a normal class, so the air filled with tension as he came forward and sat in seiza before us.

The student is one of our most senior students and has practiced over a decade. He is very intense, very dedicated to practice, and is incredibly challenging to work with (in a good way). He comes across as extremely hard to beginners, and when I was new I dreaded when he was teaching a class. After a bit of time, you realize he’s actually a very warm person who is simply pushing you harder than you thought you could go. He’s certainly one of my favorites.

As he sat, he apologized and wondered if he would make it thru what he had to say. He was straining to hold back the emotion welling up in his eyes.

A few nights prior, he entered the stairwell of a parking garage near his office. It wasn’t late. He heard footsteps approaching behind him which struck him as odd because the stairwell had been empty when he entered. As he turned, an attacker thrust a knife at him. He pivoted, and grabbed the arm. They struggled back and forth, onto the ground, then back up again. Finally he broke the attacker’s arm, and the attacker fled, dropping his knife. He picked up the knife and a second attacker appeared, saw the knife, and likewise fled. He ran to his car. It probably lasted less than 60 seconds.

He called his wife, then found Sifu to work thru what had happened. He still wasn’t exactly sure, but walked us thru what he believe occurred during the struggle. Clearly, the muscle memory of practice had saved his life in a moment when there was no time to think.

Several things struck me about this.

After practicing martial arts for several years, you start to have some confidence in your abilities. You think, if it came down to it, you’d be OK if you got attacked. Stories like this are a wakeup call from that sort of complacency. It would not be OK. This was a highly trained, dedicated martial artist who can run circles around me in the dojo and he came so close to getting stabbed there was a hole in his fitted shirt afterward and his ribs were bruised by the attacker’s knuckles.

It also struck me that there was no revenge. He broke the attacker’s arm, yes, but then he let him go. He didn’t go after the second attacker at all. He ran. He gave the knife to Sifu. He went home and held his child. This is why we practice meditation of course, but it was still powerful to see it work.

Self-defense is not enough reason to practice the art for decades, but the effectiveness of the training saved the life of one of my favorite people, a husband and a father. Maybe it saved the attacker’s life too.

Raindrop Sutra

From mother cloud we come
born again we arrive
shaped by wind and sun and time
we are separate
and alone.
Only one of countless multitudes
we call out to each other
and see reflected
on the surface
of our comrades
our own face.
Though falling is our nature
we fear the unknown end
taking comfort in
companionship we meet
the rocky ground.
To be free of endless cycles
of death and rude rebirth
we long for final home
where together
we may merge
in endless sea.

Find more of my work at The Weaving