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This wild-haired figure is one of the “Twelve Heavenly Generals” guarding the Buddha at Shin-Yakushiji Temple.  You can really grok the origins of those wild manga hairstyles when you get a close look at this nice statue, which is sculpted from clay and dates back the 8th Century.   This pamphlet dates to 1994.

Another great temple visited on my first trip to Kunming, was the famous Bamboo Temple, located in the hills due West of Kunming.  The original gate ticket is shown on the right.

This temple featues some fascinating -  if bizarre - statues of the 500 Lohan (or Buddhist adepts), shown in the photo below.  These sculptures date back to the late 19th Century, and seem to ramble up and down the walls like characters in a mad cartoon.  Some have the extended legs of storks, while others reach across the room like Plastic Man.  Most of them have absurdly long eyebrows (sign of longevity and wisdom), shaved heads, and bony figures.  And all of them have amusing details in vivid color, including robes, walking sticks, beads, sandals, and sacred relics.   In one of the smaller halls there remain a few of the lohan sculptures from an earlier incarnation of the temple (which has burned down many times during the last 1,000 years).  These older lohan are much more serene and minimalist, giving us pause to wonder about the practicioners who made the long journey to those quiet hills centuries ago.  Before the temple became a carnival of goofy caricatures, those older lohan retain a deep peacefulness in their features.  Those olden times are captured in their faces:  cold stillness of the mountain slope,  fragrance of burning incense as it drifts away into towering stands of bamboo.

On my first trip to China, in October of 1990, I entered from Hong Kong by rail to Guangzhou Station, then bought a ticket on a flight to Kunming for the following morning.    I was staying at the Camelia Hotel , then a backpacker’s paradise, with a huge co-ed dormitory and easy access to various transportation routes.  At that time, the entire Hong Kong women’s volleyball team was staying there, after having competed in the 1990 Asian Games.  What a deliriously stimulating dorm room that was!

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Thinking about Master Sheng Yen prompted me to run back over my own history of attempts at meditation, which dates back to the early 1970s and takes a ragged course up to the present day.  It occurs to me that even without touching on the teachings themselves, just a brief note on the course of events might be an amusing trip for those of us who took similar journeys, or who might not have been born yet.

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The parting message written by Master Sheng Yen to all of us:

Grown old while busy with trivial matters,
Shedding tears and laughter over emptiness…
But in the beginning there was no I,
So birth and death can both be tossed aside.
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“Amerindians have always mocked the palefaces for looking at clocks to know when they ought to be hungry.  It is in the same clock-mad spirit that we are all supposed to “work” from nine to five on such preposterous projects as accounting for what we have done upon billions of square miles of paper derived from devastated forests, frittering away our time upon such dreary gambling games as playing the stock market or selling insurance in drab offices, turning out drillions of lines of chatter for people whose minds cannot be peace unless perpetually agitated with information and misinformation, and manufacturing, selling, and advertising bizarre, noisome, and pestilential automotive contraptions for taking us all to and from these same projects at the same hours–thereby blocking the roads and jangling our nerves, presumably to give ourselves the message that we really exist and are really important.”

from Watts’ autobiography, In My Own Way (1972).

Great weekend spent on Buddhist teachings. Here we are recording Rinpoche’s talk on the 8th Century pandit, Kamalashila, and his teachings on the stages of meditation. This took place at the Hunneman Hall of the Brookline Public Library on Saturday. The following day, we held a full day meditation workshop on the basics of Shamatha and Vipashyana meditation techniques in Arlington. Hopefully, when I get the basic audio files cleaned up, we can post them on Rinpoche’s teachings website.

By the way, if you are interested in Kamalashila and the debate about “sudden enlightenment” vs. “gradual enlightenment” you may be amused by this dialogue between my original Ch’an Teacher, Master Sheng-yen and the 14th Dalai Lama, which took place at Roseland, New York in 1998.

Well I just returned from a terrific trip, including a visit to Osaka and Kyoto with my Dad. The Namba Dotonburi district is always fun, with its giant seafood sculpture signage. The Red Devil  takoyaki grilled octopus ball shop is looking pretty fashionable, too!

In Japan there is no shortage of robots, and the one in Namba that amused me was the fat automaton struggling and hobbling with two cases of Asahi beer in front of the liquor store. This strikes me as a really good use of a robot–to portray a sweaty human carrying cases of beer, and none too steady on his feet!

After swilling beer and munching seafood, you may want to stop for a rest at one of the fanciful hotels nearby, like the “International Hotel” with it’s curious facade.

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