Buddhism

We realized our vacation was pushing us over the edge after one phone call, or more precisely, the one phone call we couldn't make. My husband, Steve, and I had come to Japan in May to spend 10 days in a land that had long intrigued us. It had intrigued my brother-in-law Jim so much that he moved to Tokyo and has made it his home for more than a decade.

Occasionally they would knock on a neighbor's door to borrow tools or ask for help with a maintenance issue. But for the most part, the Buddhist nuns on Marcon Drive in Walnut kept to the ranch-style house where they lived and worshiped. For 10 years, the young women with the shaved heads and long robes were accepted as part of an eclectic neighborhood of single-family homes, a middle school, a spacious public park and four churches — one Mormon, one Lutheran and two catering to Korean American Christians.

Ton-That Niem remembers the old days in Vietnam, when children would bow automatically and often as a signal of respect to their parents. In the new country, that age-old tradition has all but died. These days, he said, some children won't even bother to acknowledge their parents when they walk in the front door.

Vincent Horn opened his eyes after a moment of meditation, scanned the room and smiled. About 150 other people were emerging from their own states of dead-silent, self-induced tranquillity. They shuffled a bit in their seats. "Hello, Buddhist geeks!" Horn said from his perch onstage. "This is the most geeks I've seen in one place, I think, ever. " His statement brought to mind a moment in the documentary "Woodstock," when folk singer Arlo Guthrie takes in the crowd of several hundred thousand young people and cackles, "Lotta freaks!"

What comes to mind when you think of Buddhist art? A serene figure seated in a meditative pose, eyes closed, legs crossed, soles up? The Norton Simon Museum has many such examples in its collection, but the Pasadena institution's new exhibition, "Divine Demons: Wrathful Deities of Buddhist Art," offers something different. The gods Mahakala and Hayagriva, seen in richly detailed sculptures and paintings, lash out at foes with several sets of arms and stomp them into submission. Divine as the deities may be, they are not just having a little rant on a bad day. They are doing their jobs -- protecting Buddhist faith with physical force and terrifying symbolism.

In the early 1990s, readers looked for inner peace in a book called "The Tao of Pooh," a guide to the basic tenets of the ancient Chinese religion of Taoism as experienced by the lovable children's book character, Winnie the Pooh. Well, Taoism, it seems, has fallen out of vogue. This week booksellers are making room for "Buddhism for Bears" (St. Martin's Press, $12.95), an easy-to-understand guide to the methodology of Buddhism, founded in northern India around 500 BC.

About 6,000 Dalits, often segregated as "untouchables" in India's Hindu caste hierarchy, converted to Buddhism in Kanpur, 240 miles southeast of New Delhi. Leaders of the ritual said they were protesting caste discrimination and India's failure to raise the issue at the U.N. conference on racism that concluded in South Africa over the weekend. Hundreds of monks arrived from Nepal, Japan and other countries to witness the ceremony Saturday, which was presided over by a Japanese Buddhist priest.

In welcoming the Dalai Lama to Los Angeles on behalf of the diverse Buddhist community this week, a monk already prominent in organizing American Buddhists took the occasion to propose new ways to reduce tensions arising among U.S. practitioners of the ancient religion.

Blocks away from the triumphant Los Angeles Lakers victory parade Wednesday, the Buddhist priest pondered the win, the way and the sound of thousands of hands clapping. Yes, said the Rev. Noriaki Ito, he expected the Lakers would ride to a world championship the moment he heard Coach Phil Jackson was coming to town. He had followed him for years, knew he practiced Zen meditation and knew he incorporated those concepts into his coaching. Jackson, of course, practices more than Zen.

Pointed remarks about Buddhism, penned by Pope John Paul II, are igniting religious passions in Sri Lanka that threaten to disturb the pontiff's visit to the predominantly Buddhist island nation next week. On Wednesday, trying to defuse the dispute as he set off on his 11-day tour of Asian and Pacific nations, John Paul proclaimed his "profound respect and sincere esteem" for Buddhism.

MOVIES 'Bouncing Cats' This lively documentary, which was featured in the second season of the LA New Wave International Film Festival, tells the inspiring story of one man's attempt to create a better life for the children of Uganda using the unlikely tool of hip-hop with a focus on b-boy culture and break dancing. Featuring narration by Common and interviews with Mos Def, will.i.am and K'naan. The Grammy Museum, 800 W. Olympic Blvd., downtown. 7:30 p.m. Free. RSVP required.

When Sharon Salzberg returned to New York from her first trips to India in the 1970s, a crinkled cotton blouse was still exotic and people would politely sidle away from her at parties after she told them she taught meditation for a living. Now even Starbucks sells chai (a milky Indian spice tea), and a landmark Massachusetts General Hospital study released last month has documented that the brain shows positive physical changes ? in density of gray matter ? after just eight weeks of meditation.

He's a "living Buddha" with movie-star good looks and an iPod, a 25-year-old who rubs shoulders with Richard Gere and Tom Cruise and is mentioned as a successor to the Dalai Lama. Now allegations that he's a Chinese spy, and a money launderer to boot, have laid bare divisions in the outwardly serene world of Tibetan Buddhism and longtime tensions between China and India. There's a lot at stake. The Karmapa is among Tibetan Buddhism's most revered figures and heads the religion's wealthiest sect, with property estimated at $1.2 billion worldwide.

Of all fields of medicine, psychology seems especially prone to fads. Freudian dream analysis, recovered memory therapy, eye movement desensitization for trauma ? lots of once-hot psychological theories and treatments eventually fizzled. Now along comes mindfulness therapy, a meditation-based treatment with foundations in Buddhism and yoga that's taking off in private practices and university psychology departments across the country. "Mindfulness has become a buzzword, especially with younger therapists," said Stefan Hofmann, a professor of psychology at Boston University's Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders.

Molecular biologist and author Jon Kabat-Zinn was a pioneer in applying the Buddhist concept of mindfulness to Western medicine and secular society. But he doesn't consider himself a Buddhist. "Mindfulness, the heart of Buddhist meditation, is at the core of being able to live life as if it really matters. It has nothing to do with Buddhism. It has to do with freedom," Kabat-Zinn said in a telephone interview from Lexington, Mass. "Mindfulness is so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.

In the crimson-painted interior of a monastery in central Mongolia, boys as young as 6 face one another cross-legged on benches and chant Tibetan Buddhist prayers that they barely understand. Some fidget and get up every now and then to ladle bowls of fermented horse milk from a large metal vat. Their teachers occasionally call out directions. The boys are at a three-month religious camp at the monastery, Shand Khiid. The oldest monk in residence is 97. A visiting sage from Tibet relaxes in a back room, watching sports on television.

In the Student Union Building of Cal Poly Pomona, over a lunch of Gummi Bears and soda pop, the members of the Buddhist Assn. are gathered to learn about the religious traditions of their parents and grandparents. They say it is one part of the family heritage their relatives all but left behind in China, Vietnam or other countries where Buddhism has thrived.

The passive, otherworldly image of Buddhism can be misleading. In Burma, where two-thirds of the country is Buddhist, the religion has an overwhelming influence on day-to-day life and plays a continuing political role that makes the current protest marches by tens of thousands of monks through the streets of Yangon especially significant. Buddhism has long been one of the key ingredients of Burmese nationalism, and it has been used by political leaders of all stripes as a source of legitimacy.

Robert Aitken, an influential American Zen master and writer who emphasized a path to enlightenment through social action, died of pneumonia Thursday in a Honolulu hospital. He was 93. His death was confirmed by Roland Sugimoto, administrator of Honolulu Diamond Sangha, a Zen Buddhist network with more than 20 affiliated groups around the world that Aitken founded more than 50 years ago with his late wife, Anne Hopkins Aitken. Aitken was one of the first Americans to be fully sanctioned as a master of Zen Buddhism and trained several generations of Zen Buddhist teachers.

In 1972, Jack Kornfield stepped off a plane in Washington, D.C., his head shaved and his body swathed in golden robes. He had come home to see if he could make it as a monk in America. Kornfield had spent several contemplative years at a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, where he lived with few possessions, followed a strict monastic code and retreated each day to the lush forest for hours of meditation. But in the U.S., he found no monasteries that practiced the Vipassana meditation he had studied.