Napoleon again

Watching the WV legislature is an occasionally enjoyable spectator sport. Earlier today, which is almost yesterday at this point, I watched an interim committee meeting in which the staff person for an anti-gay "religious" group dug himself in deeper and deeper in a rambling speech.

A line from Napoleon which may well have appeared here before came to mind: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

(Of course El Cabrero has no enemies. He may, however, have any number of euphemisms.)

THIS IS GOING TO BE INTERESTING. The Supremes vs health care reform, that is.

EXTREME INEQUALITY makes for bad economics.

THE WHOLE REGULATIONS KILLING JOBS THING isn't all it's cracked up to be.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Only that day dawns

Goat Rope has been spending a bit of time with Henry David Thoreau lately. His writings are full of great nuggets. If you are a fan, click on last week's posts.

Old Henry had a Buddhist soul, although his direct knowledge of the Buddha or Buddhist teachings was very limited. Not a lot was known about Buddhist teachings in the early and mid 19th century America. If memory serves, he may have read a little of a translation of the Lotus Sutra, a Mahayana text which contains little if any information about the "historical Buddha."

Some may want to chalk that up to karmic affinity...

He professed his fondness for Buddha and Christ in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, where amidst musings on various religions he wrote

I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.

Although he didn't have the chance to learn Buddhist meditation techniques, he seemed to have got there on his own, as this passage in Walden indicates:

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than the work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.

He also picked right up on the grand Dharma theme of wakefulness, as is shown in quotes like

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

And

I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

Sorry, Kerouac, but I think he might have been America's first Dharma bum.

MISSING MATCH. Many states are going to have to make painful cuts unless Congress extends the matching Medicaid funding which is part of the Recovery Act.

WHISTLEBLOWING. The folks at Massey Energy don't take too kindly to it, according to this NPR report.

GETTING REGULATION RIGHT. Here's an interesting take from the financial page of the New Yorker.

THE BATTLE OF BLAIR MOUNTAIN, a major historic site of WV's mine wars, continues.

ZOMBIE CHIC. What's up with the popularity of zombies in pop culture?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The barbarian from the west

Bodhidharma, the monk who brought Zen Buddhism to China, from an 1887 woodblock by Yoshitoshi. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Although I'm not a card-carrying Buddhist, I've been a student of it for many years. As I mentioned in earlier posts this week, I was aware of the Buddha from early childhood, thanks to the artifacts of wandering grandparents. But it was another major figure from Buddhist history who had the most immediate impact on my life.

When I was a kid, like many boys, I was interesting in fighting--especially in exotic fighting arts from Asia. This was just before the big kung fu boom in the early 1970s. At the time, I could find no affordable place to study so I read everything I could get my hands on.

Many books about karate and kung fu (aka gung-fu, wushu, kuoshu, etc.) then and now relate a legend that says these arts were founded by a wandering monk who made the hazardous journey from India to China to promote a new Buddhist teaching (Zen in Japanese, Chan in Chinese, and dhyana in Sanskrit).

It was said that this monk (Bodhidharma in Sanskrit, Tamo in Chinese, Daruma in Japanese) arrived at the now famous Shaolin Temple and found the monks there to be too weak to progress in meditation. He was said to have taught them a series of exercises for health and self defense that would eventually become the basis for Shaolin kung fu and the many arts it influenced.

Now this story is more a matter of legend than fact but I did get something out of it at the time which was worth keeping: the idea that mind and body were essentially one and the same and that one can't develop one without the other.

Later, I went on to investigate the other, older legends about Bodhidharma which were entertaining and colorful in their own right. About which more tomorrow.

WEST VIRGINIA SUPREME JOKE. The ripples just keep getting wider and wider over the scandal involving WV Supreme Court Justice Brent Benjamin, Massey Energy, and its CEO Don Blankenship. All kinds of groups, including (Wal-Mart!) have weighed in saying that it looks tacky for a justice whose seat was purchased by a corporate pal to rule in favor of that corporation.

FEAR OF SUCCESS may be driving the anti-stimulus crowd, economist Dean Baker argues.

MYTHS OF DE-REGULATION. Regulation of some kind is going to happen--it's a question of who benefits.

IN PRAISE OF MELANCHOLY. Happiness is fine, but the blues have their place.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED