[MD] Stephen Asma

[John Carl]

http://www.ralphmag.org/DO/briefs.html

He is a guy who will talk for awhile about Nirvana --- called here Nibbana
--- and then go off to see a sex show or visit a whore house; he is one who
will have a few beers before going off to meditate in a wat. He eats some
pot pizza, has visions, and then watches horrified as one of the political
heavies of Phnom Penh gets shot right there in front of him.

He is up to here with facts: that Thich Quang Duc (the monk who immolated
himself in 1963) wasn't protesting the Viet-Nam war but, rather, the
Catholics of South Viet Nam who closed down the Buddhist temples, hounded
and murdered Buddhist priests.

He suggests that the Buddha was truly a Socratic thinker , one who existed
long before Socrates, whose message was *don't take it on faith; try it and
see if it works.*

Nibbana is not some far off paradise-in-the-sky. It's here, right now, but
most Westeners don't get it because we are "always becoming." Nibbbana
arrives when one has given up something very simple: desire. To abandon
desire means abandoning pain.

He compares the universe to a laser photograph: All of a picture is included
in any of the tiny portions of the negative ... thus, "the whole story of
the universe is implicit in any part of it."

Most of all, Asma has a love for the Cambodian Khmer world, which he conveys
it with simplicity:


   *I'd sit down at a sidewalk food stand, and the proprietor might come sit
   next to me smiling and introducing family members, while an elephant
   lumbered by slowly, and a man with no legs or lower torso rolled up on a
   cart and took my shoes off for shining, and a snack plate of barbecued
   insects appeared on the table, followed by an amazing fish dish served
   inside a halved coconut, and the streets might literally flood in minutes
   with monsoon rains, leaving motos and cyclos to wobble slowly through the
   muddy streets. I was forced to focus on everything because everything seemed
   to require it --- I had to practice mindfulness by necessity. But even
   though my mindfulness was almost coerced by the exotic environment of
   Southeast Asia, I did carry some of that appreciation back to my less exotic
   life in Chicago."*